Global development

Coronavirus outbreak: Britons fly out of Wuhan as death toll passes 200

Flight carrying 83 British people and 27 foreign nationals will land in the UK on Friday as US tells citizens ‘don’t go to China’

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A plane carrying more than 100 British and other EU nationals trapped in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, has left for the UK after Chinese spouses and partners were given permission to travel.

The chartered flight left Wuhan at 9:45am local time on Friday, the Foreign Office said in a statement. The plane was carrying 83 British people and 27 foreign nationals, and was scheduled to land at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire at 1 pm UK time.

Two patients in England, who are members of the same family, were also revealed on Friday to have tested positive for coronavirus. The Department of Health declined to say where in England the patients were from but it is understood they are not in the Wirral area, where a special facility has been set up to quarantine Britons evacuated from Wuhan.

The flight will continue on to Spain following the stopover in the UK, at which point EU nationals’ home countries will take responsibility for them, it added.

German said on Friday it was dispatching military plane to China to evacuate more than 100 German citizens. It will arrive in Germany on Saturday and the evacuees would be kept in quarantine for two weeks.

South Korea on Friday also evacuated 367 of its citizens from Wuhan. They arrived back in Gimpo on Friday morning as the country confirmed a seventh case of coronavirus infection.

The evacuations came as the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency and the US raised its travel warning to level 4, its highest level, and told its citizens not to travel to China.

The US advice also said those currently in China should consider departing using commercial means.

Hours before the UK-bound flight left, China said the death toll from the outbreak had risen by 43 overnight to 213. All of the deaths have occurred in China, which recorded 9,692 cases as of Friday, compared with 7,711 confirmed cases 24 hours earlier. The virus has now infected more people in China than fell ill in the country during the 2002-3 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars).