90-Second Read: ‘It was either this or the pool’: Hantavirus ship becomes latest Tenerife tourist attraction

Christened the "rat virus boat" by the internet after three people travelling onboard died of Hantavirus, a disease normally carried by rats and mice, its story has enraptured people all over the world. It took a while for the cause to be diagnosed as Hantavirus. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeated the refrain that the outbreak was "not the start of a Covid pandemic" dozens of times in the lead up to the 24-hour evacuation period in Tenerife. And now, after reaching the Canary Islands shortly before dawn on Sunday, the ship is finally being evacuated, ending the ordeal for the remaining 149 passengers and crew. The scene is watched from the hire car of Amy Byres and Emma Armitage from Sheffield.

The passengers and crew from 23 countries are being repatriated thanks to an enormous international effort led by the WHO and coordinated by the Spanish government, which offered Tenerife as a base to launch the rescue. But only a PCR test would confirm whether Hantavirus, which has an incubation period of up to eight weeks, is present in their systems. Returning passengers to the country are being asked to self isolate, something an American journalist asked Javier Padilla Bernáldez, the Spanish secretary of state for health, for his opinion on. Some are gazing through binoculars while others are taking photos on their phones of a vessel only a few hundreds metres away, anchored near the Granadillo commercial port. It is the MV Hondius, the small cruise ship at the centre.

It was either this or lay by the pool all day," added Byres. The disease, though not uncommon, is rarely spread person-to-person. The variant is not new, and health bodies have sought to reassure people that it is a known pathogen, not a new disease such as Covid-19. Those onboard have had their temperatures taken by WHO tropical medicine doctors and have shown no symptoms of a possible infection. The pair said they had spent their holiday fascinated by the story of the passengers trapped on board and confined to cabins, in between their whale-watching and quad biking activities.

It is the first time many of them have been outside since they were locked down in their cabins several days ago, after the deaths of a Dutch couple and a German passenger. There are few parallels with the virus that caused the global pandemic in 2019 but all over the world people have feared what would happen if another disease was able to get out of control. We saw this at the start of our trip, we arrived on Monday, and we've been following it all week on TikTok. Boatload after boatload of blue plasticky figures appeared, to be loaded on to coaches by health workers in hazmat suits and face masks. While the WHO recommends each passenger isolate for 45 days from the last contact point, 6 May.