When Stephen Kornfeld set sail on the MV Hondius in early April, his main plan for the trip was to add as many new species as possible to his flight list. An oncologist in Bend, Oregon, Kornfeld is also an avid traveler—second in eBird’s prestigious rankings of birders worldwide-and the ship would visit several remote islands, where he could see some of the most unknown birds in the world. But last week, Kornfeld’s trip took an unexpected turn: He stepped in to care for three people thought to be sick with hantavirus, a severe respiratory pathogen that can kill about half the people it infects. Kornfeld was, and still is, “a passenger on this boat,” he told me. “But I became a doctor on this boat.”
Since the departure of the MV Hondius, at least eight people have disembarked with suspected or confirmed cases of hantavirus; three are dead. People usually become infected with the virus through the air-filled feces or other body fluids of infected rodents. But the World Health Organization has confirmed that this hantavirus is a species called the Andes virus, which is sometimes spread from person to person, under conditions of close and long-term contact – such as, say, on a cruise ship with about 150 people.
A month ago, when the cruise left Argentina, Kornfeld and the other passengers—among them, dozens of boarders—were shouting about the whales, seals and dolphins they saw frolicking in the South Atlantic, and gossiping about the adventures ahead. When a 70-year-old Dutchman, one of the passengers, died on the plane on April 11, Kornfeld and others were shaken but considered the incident a freak accident, with no effect on anyone else on the plane. But then, about two weeks later, the Dutchman’s wife fell ill, too, and died shortly after being taken off the ship. After another bird, an Englishman, developed a fever and began struggling to breathe, he was transferred to a South African intensive care unit, where he continues to be treated.
By the end of April, three other people on the ship had begun to feel seriously ill—including two crew members, among them the ship’s doctor, who was examining other patients. Most people on the ship’s small crew were trained to provide some level of medical assistance. But there was no official backup doctor, Kornfeld said, and when the crew began asking which of the passengers had a medical history, few were able to help.
Sensing the urgency of the situation, Kornfeld stepped in. He officially began assisting the staff on May 1—last Friday—first assuming the doctor would only need help for a day or two while he recovered from what was thought to be a short-term, flu-like illness. But the situation began to improve quickly. The next day, a sick passenger, a German woman, died; around the same time, test results from sick passengers who had left the ship started coming back—sending word. hantavirus pass on board. The ship’s doctor had suffered so many symptoms that he had to lock himself in his quarters. There is a possibility of serious infectious disease aboard the ship, and “the ship’s doctor would not be able to function as a ship’s doctor,” Kornfeld said. The chief medical duties of the cruise now, by default, fell to him.
Kornfeld had retired from his part-time job in oncology more than a decade ago, though he still does occasional shifts at several rural Oregon hospitals. Now she was being pushed into a life-or-death situation, caring for the sick and potentially contagious while trying to communicate with the other passengers on board, all with very limited resources. Several members of the crew helped him where they could. But even though the ship had a medical center of sorts, Kornfeld told me he found more than the equipment a marine doctor would need to deal with a common illness at sea: some anti-inflammatory drugs, a few over-the-counter medications, a bunch of oxygen tanks — not surprisingly, not the kinds of chest scanners or ventilators that might come in for serious illness and to manage respiratory illness. The ship had plenty of surgical masks, though, as well as N95 respirators. Kornfeld wore one strap each day he was with patients, along with goggles, an apron, and gloves.
Kornfeld’s new role on the boat put him at the center of an international effort to save these patients — and, ultimately, contain the outbreaks. In between seeing her patients, she exchanged phone calls, emails, and WhatsApp messages with medical and research experts from several groups, she told me, including the WHO and Oceanwide Travel, the company that runs the trip. Among the experts he joined are some of the world’s leading hantavirus researchers; whatever questions he had, he got the answers. (When reached for comment, WHO referred me to a Thursday press conferencebut declined to comment on Kornfeld specifically. Oceanwide declined to comment on “individual stories” from the MV Hondius, instead referring me to the media on the outbreak.)
In a way, the possibility of hantavirus made the situation easier. “In medicine, the patient is the patient,” Kornfeld said. Hantavirus has no specific cure or treatment; helping those who might have been infected was not a matter of giving some medicine but monitoring, preventing deterioration, and endangering other passengers or other workers who came to him with alarming symptoms.
After the German passenger died, the ship anchored off the coast of Cabo Verde to await the transfer of medical personnel. Doctors from the island came on board examining patients but did not stay long. Kornfeld continued to tend to his patients around the clock: On Tuesday, he told me, he spent nearly 18 hours anxiously monitoring their fluid status and oxygen levels, hoping their hearts and lungs wouldn’t fail; that night, he estimates he slept for three hours.
By then, Kornfeld was also a great source of intelligence for his fellow passengers. They wanted to know the dangers of the situation; they wanted him to tell them how troubled he was with diarrhea, backache, the wrong cough—what, what? Others also approached him worried about their medication, which was running dangerously low, talking to him through a mask between his patient shifts. Eventually, he became known to many around the boat as “Doctor Steve.”
With hantavirus now a clear and present threat, the ship’s crew took action, too, Peter Marsh, one of the ship’s passengers and crew, told me — “to try to contain the situation and keep the rest of us safe.” They advised covering the face and distance, and asked the passengers to stay in their cabins as much as possible when they were not carefully interacting on the outer deck; The crew doubled down on cleaning procedures throughout the boat. In fact, “we started to adopt the original COVID protocol,” Kenneth Petersen, another of Kornfeld’s bird watchers on the ship, told me. Kornfeld’s presence was especially encouraging to many of the ship’s aviators, among whom the doctor was renowned for his anthropological skills, Marsh, who has known Kornfeld for more than a decade, told me: “When he gave medical advice, they were very receptive.”
The two sick crew members were evacuated on Wednesday, along with—out of caution—the female passenger who died on the plane last week. Meanwhile, no one else came to Kornfeld with related symptoms, he told me. Overall, the mood inside remains relatively optimistic, passengers I spoke to said: Many people still (consciously) participate in the morning outdoor exercise classes, and in the afternoon, Kornfeld still sees dancing around the deck while people enjoy their drinks. And they have come out in whatever ways they can for each other. Even when the workers fell ill, their colleagues passed them words of encouragement through their closed cabin doors; when medically discharged, passengers signed recovery cards.
The ship left Cabo Verde yesterday and is expected to dock in the Canary Islands this weekend. Now inside are officials from the WHO and the European CDC, as well as two infectious disease doctors from the Netherlands, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting director of outbreak and epidemic control at the WHO, told me. They will watch and wait to see if others get sick. The next big hurdle will be getting everyone home, as officials assess the boat and its passengers, and countries with citizens aboard weigh how to handle their return.
Kornfeld expects to be monitored closely in the future, given how much time he spent with patients. He told me that he was comforted by the knowledge that this type of virus seemed to require prolonged exposure to do damage, and that he took the proper precautions; as a doctor, part of his script is to help others, even at his own risk. Now “if I don’t have help anymore, I’m happy to just fade away and be a passenger again,” he said. Although this trip may be best remembered for its hantavirus complications, Kornfeld told me his initial expectations of the flight were not in vain. He saw about two dozen new species on the weeklong trip. And although the boat did not land on Cabo Verde, he still saw a bird that he expected to see there, flying over the island. His most recent eBird log is marked May 3, 2026: Cape Verde swift.
