A French woman and an American national evacuated from the cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak have tested positive for the virus, as the complex operation to repatriate those on board continued on Monday.

The French woman was one of five French passengers who disembarked from the ship in Tenerife on Sunday before being flown to a hospital in Paris.

The French health minister, Stéphanie Rist, said the woman was in a serious condition on Monday. Rist said the woman started to feel very unwell on Sunday night and “tests came back positive”. Rist told France Inter radio: “Unfortunately, her symptoms worsened overnight.” She is being treated in a specialised infectious diseases unit of a hospital in Paris.

An American passenger who was flown to Nebraska along with 16 others on Sunday evening also tested positive but had no symptoms. The US health department said one American national evacuated from the ship had tested positive for the Andes strain – the only hantavirus strain that is transmissible between humans – and another had “mild symptoms”.

Personnel in full-body protective gear and breathing masks began escorting the travellers from ship to shore in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday in an effort that was continuing on Monday. More than 100 people of 23 nationalities are to be evacuated in less than 48 hours an in operation described by Spanish authorities as “complex” and “unprecedented”.

Three passengers from the MV Hondius – a Dutch couple and a German woman – have died, while others have fallen sick with the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents.

No vaccines or specific treatments exist for hantavirus, which is endemic in Argentina, where the ship departed in April.

But health officials have insisted that the risk for global public health is low and played down comparisons to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rist said 22 more contact cases had been identified among French nationals, including eight people who had travelled on an 25 April flight between Saint Helena and Johannesburg, and 14 more on a flight between Johannesburg and Amsterdam.

The Dutch woman who died was on the flight to Johannesburg and later briefly boarded a flight to Amsterdam but was removed before takeoff.

Health authorities in several countries have been tracking passengers who had already disembarked from the ship, plus anyone who may have come into contact with them.

The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, will hold a meeting of medical advisers and ministers this afternoon to follow the issue.

The French government spokesperson, Maud Bregeon, told BFMTV that it was important not to spread a sense of “panic”. She said: “We’re following the situation with the greatest vigilance, on the basis that it is a virus that we know, that a 42-day isolation period has been decided and the objective remains the same: protecting the French people.”

The repatriation operation in Tenerife evacuated 94 people of 19 different nationalities on Sunday, the Spanish health minister, Mónica García, said.

Spanish officials said the evacuation of most of the ship’s nearly 150 passengers and crew, which includes 23 nationalities, would continue until the final repatriation flights to Australia and the Netherlands on Monday afternoon.

The ship will refuel in the morning and is expected to depart for the Netherlands with about 30 crew members on Monday evening.

Passengers wearing blue medical suits began disembarking the Dutch-flagged vessel on Sunday to reach the small industrial port of Granadilla on Tenerife.

They boarded Spanish army buses and travelled to Tenerife South airport in a convoy before boarding their repatriation flights.

The World Health Organization recommends a 42-day quarantine and “active follow-up”, including daily checks for symptoms such as fever, the UN body’s lead for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, Maria Van Kerkhove, said in Geneva.

A Melbourne man gambled $895,733 through online betting platforms in the four years between his 18th birthday and the day he took his own life, an inquest has heard.

Victorian coroner Paul Lawrie’s inquest into the circumstances of Kyle Hudson’s death on 6 July 2021 began on Monday, and will interrogate whether betting companies accurately assessed the risk of gambling-related harm in the years prior to Werribee man’s death.

The inquest would also examine the immediate circumstances and likely contributing factors to the Werribee man’s suicide, his personal and financial history and his online gambling history with Sportsbet, Entain and bet365, counsel assisting the coroner, Georgina Coghlan KC, told the court.

In total, his online gambling turnover was $895,733 – with an overall net loss of more than $47,000, the inquest heard.

During Monday’s hearing, Hudson was described by his girlfriend of seven years, Ashley Baker, as “a genuine good bloke” with a “quiet nature” who “would never swear or raise his voice at me”. But she said the construction management student also loved gambling, telling the inquest that he opened an online betting account with Sportsbet on his 18th birthday in 2017.

“The only thing Kyle and I would argue over was his gambling,” Baker told the inquest.

The first inkling Baker had that Hudson may have been struggling with betting was after his birthday when they were on holiday at Phillip Island and he was “unusually quiet”. She knew he had received $2,000 from his mother as a birthday gift, she said.

“I queried him on what was wrong, and he told me he lost all his money and that he wanted to die. It was a really unusual thing for him to say, and I asked him not to say that,” Baker told the court.

“I think this represented Kyle’s first significant [gambling] loss. This is really when Kyle’s habit turned bad.”

Hudson had tried numerous times to reduce and limit his gambling, Baker said, including imposing limits on himself and taking breaks. He eventually gave her control of most of his money and the password to his Sportsbet account after he lost $20,000 – all his savings – in December 2020.

The “cycle” was so frequent “it was almost normal”, Baker told the inquest.

In the days leading up to his death, Hudson began asking her for money, speaking to her in a way that “felt out of character for him”, Baker said. She eventually sent him about $5,500 and told him that their relationship was over. When she saw in his account that he’d been betting, she felt he “had made his decision”.

On Hudson’s computer, Baker said she discovered evidence that he had bet thousands of dollars in the last 24 hours of his life, and “had blown all his savings”.

Hudson was betting an average of 4.6 times a day with Sportsbet and had triggered a behavioural alert on average every six weeks since he began gambling – including just two months after his 18th birthday, the inquest heard. Documents tendered in court showed that Hudson placed 999 bets – with an average stake of $107 – in the first six months of his activity with Sportsbet.

Sarah Rizzo, Sportsbet’s director of customer operations, told the inquest that Hudson’s betting behaviour had triggered behavioural alerts on 37 occasions, all but one of which were due to him being aged 22 or under, and betting more than $3,000 in a rolling week.

On many of those occasions, the company responded by sending Hudson “safer gambling” emails, which Coghlan told the inquest were almost identical in content and contained no specific information on “problematic deposits or concerns about how much someone might be betting”. At no time during his period gambling with Sportsbet did Hudson meet the company’s highest risk threshold.

In some cases, Rizzo said, the email would have been sent after a more in-depth phone conversation. The detail of those conversations, however, was unknown as Sportsbet did not retain the call recordings.

Hudson’s account was suspended five times, but in most cases was reactivated again after he called and told a safer gambling specialist that he was “betting within [his] limits”, the inquest heard.

Lawrie asked Rizzo on Monday: “The overall view that is put forward is that Mr Hudson was a reasonably sophisticated gambler who was doing reasonably well and appeared to be consistent and in control?”

Rizzo replied: “Yes, that’s correct.”

With hindsight, she said she could “acknowledge that there may be times that Mr Hudson’s gambling did get away from him”.

The company’s procedures have changed since Hudson’s death, Rizzo said, to the extent that such behaviour would now trigger 70 alerts, some of which would have resulted in blocking deposits and mandatory deposit limits.

Representatives from Entain Group and Hillside, the owner of bet365, are scheduled to give evidence later this week.

The inquest continues.

A former Woolworths employee has been accused of wasting the Fair Work Commission’s time for filing an unfair dismissal case over feeling “upset” at being told to cover up his bum crack.

In a decision published on Thursday, the Fair Work Commission deputy president, Alan Colman, said he had rejected the Victorian man’s application for compensation in part because the dismissal never occurred in the first place.

It was the man’s fifth application in two years.

“Anyone wanting insight into the phenomenon of unmeritorious claims in the Fair Work Commission may wish to consider the case of [the complainant], whose application … I dismissed ex tempore earlier today,” he said.

Paraphrasing, Colman said the complainant, while working a casual shift at the supermarket, was told by a co-worker that “the cleft of his bottom was protruding from his trousers” and it was suggested “in rude terms, that he cover up”.

In layperson’s terms, the complainant was referring to the exposure of his bum crack, also known colloquially as the “builder’s bum” or “plumber’s crack”, an unfortunate yet common occurrence for people in jobs with regular bending and movement.

“[The complainant] was upset. His feelings were hurt,” Colman continued.

“He lodged an application alleging that he had been dismissed in breach of his workplace rights under Part 3-1 of the act.

“He wanted compensation. What dismissal? That was what Woolworths wanted to know.”

Colman said the supermarket chain countered the man continued to work shifts after lodging his claim and later stopped turning up for work, contrary to his application.

“[The complainant] was not dismissed,” he said. “He had no standing to make the application. This case had nothing to do with dismissal.

“It was evidently a speculative claim made in pursuit of a monetary settlement that would spare Woolworths the nuisance of defending it.”

Colman said he was unable to put that argument to the complainant because he ignored his direction to attend the telephone hearing.

“Unmeritorious claimants have little to lose,” Colman said.

“This is unfair to respondents who have no case to answer. It is unfair to applicants with cases of substance waiting their turn to be heard … Very often there are no compensable costs, only wasted time.

“There is no effective disincentive for speculative claims, and so they come, in great numbers, compounding the Commission’s burgeoning caseload.”

Lodgements to the Fair Work Commission have surged in the past five years, rising from 29,631 in 2020-21 to 44,075 in 2024-25. They are expected to continue climbing in excess of 50,000 in the coming year.

President of the Fair Work Commission, Justice Adam Hatcher, told the Victorian Bar in February that the proliferation of AI tools including ChatGPT since 2022 was a main driver for the surge.

“In the previous decade, there was a clear correlation between the number of dismissal-related applications and the state of the labour market,” he said.

“However, that statistical relationship has broken down in the last couple of years.

“The clue that the growth in lodgments was AI-driven first became apparent by the widespread use of AI-generated language in the applications being filed. Once you learn what this looks like, it becomes pretty easy to spot.”