The 17 Americans onboard the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship M/V Hondius were being repatriated to the United States on Sunday after the vessel docked in Tenerife and all the passengers were evacuated.

Upon their arrival in Spain, medical teams from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were waiting and interviewed the passengers, whose identities have not been publicly disclosed and who have not tested positive for the virus, about their exposure on the cruise.

The passengers were set to arrive in Nebraska on a special chartered flight, the authorities said. Nebraska is home to the national quarantine unit and the Nebraska biocontainment unit.

Describing the process following the Americans’ arrival at Omaha, the acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya told CNN on Sunday: “We’re going to interview them and assess them for risk.”

“If they weren’t in close contact with someone who was symptomatic, then we’re going to deem them low risk. If they were in close contact, we’re going to deem them medium or high risk. At that point, we will offer them alternatives,” Bhattacharya said.

Those will include “an offer to stay in Nebraska if they like, or if they want, to go back home and [if] their home situation allows it, to safely fly them home without exposing other people on the way,” he added, noting that the passengers who choose to go back home will be put under the “auspices of their state and local public health agencies, with the CDC support all the way”.

Addressing concerns over the hantavirus being compared to the Covid-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya said: “This is not Covid … and we don’t want to … cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols that … were successful in containing outbreaks in the past.”

Bhattacharya continued: “We followed those protocols … This health alert is coming out, because, again, there’s this discrete event of the 17 arriving in the United States very, very soon and so we just want to make sure that the medical community understands this.”

On Friday, the CDC issued a health alert for clinicians and health departments which included guidance for providers and outlined symptoms associated with hantavirus exposure.

On Saturday, a CDC official told reporters on a call: “We are not quarantining anybody,” according to ABC, adding that “It is not recommended to test people that do not have symptoms.”