Six quarantined travellers from an ill-fated cruise struck by a hantavirus outbreak are finally making their way home this morning, after spending the past several weeks in a special facility in Bullsbrook.
The group arrived at Perth Airport Tuesday morning about 4.30am just hours after their 42-day mandatory quarantine period came to a formal end.
It marked their first interaction with the ‘outside world’ and a return to normal living.
Despite the shake-up to their original travel plans and unscheduled West Australian stopover, the tourists spoke highly of their time in Perth.
The experience was described as “pretty good actually” by one of the men, who said they were tested “all the time” but got out for “plenty of walks”.
Dining at the Bullsbrook facility was also a highlight.
“We had good food, quite a variety, some good pizzas,” he said.
Peter Marsh, one of the quarantined travellers who previously spoke to media, said the facility had proved an “absolutely perfect” place to quarantine.
“(We were) very, very well looked after by the staff,” he said.
“We have been incredibly grateful for the Commonwealth government and the staff who looked after us.”
The four Australians, one permanent resident and one person from New Zealand were escorted through check-in at the Qantas terminal in a process that took no longer than 10 minutes.
The group was briefly addressed by airport staff at a desk before being walked towards a security check point.
The cohort were repatriated to Perth on May 15 after an outbreak of hantavirus on board MV Hondius, a cruise ship bound for Antarctica. The virus ultimately killed three people.
The Australian contingent were among the last to leave the ship and first had to quarantine in the Netherlands, where they stayed in a hotel for several days while the Federal Government worked to secure a plane, a crew willing to travel with them, and a country to agree to a fuel stop on their return to Australia.
The flight eventually took off from Eindhoven Airport on May 14 and made a refuelling stop at Al Minhad Airbase in the United Arab Emirates before touching down in WA about 11.30am AWST on May 15.
Six weeks later they are now finally on the way back to homes, including in New South Wales and Queensland.
They were the first people to use the Federal Government’s 500-bed Centre for Resilience for what it was built for following the COVID outbreak earlier this decade.
At the centre, each traveller was subject to daily symptom checks and limited to two one-hour walking slots each day.
It comes after 20 British passengers were released on Monday, as well as 18 America passengers who had been held for weeks at a federal facility in Nebraska.
They had been among 147 people from 23 nations on board the MV Hondius which was hit with a rare case of the Andes strain in Johannesburg on May 2.
Beyond MV Hondius passengers there has been no further community spread of the hantavirus outbreak.
The disease can be transmitted between people who have close contact with each other and can be deadly, with a 40 per cent case fatality rate for the Andes virus, 40 times that of COVID-19.
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