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’
by Justin McCurry, Rebecca RatcliffeA 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).
Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, said: “It’s welcome news that our evacuation flight has now left Wuhan. We know how distressing the situation has been for those waiting to leave. We have been working round the clock to clear the way for a safe departure.”
Previously, Chinese authorities had said that no one with a Chinese passport would be allowed to travel on the flight, which was originally due to leave Wuhan on Thursday. On Thursday night, however, the Foreign Office confirmed that Britons would be allowed to bring their dependents onboard and dual nationals would also be allowed.
Just hours before the flight departed, there was a lack of clarity over who would be allowed to board the plane, and how people would reach the airport given the ban on public transport and most private cars.
Nick, who has dual British and US citizenship, and who has a wife and two children in Wuhan, was among those who did not board the plane. He was initially told there was no guarantee that his wife, who is Indonesian, would be able to fly.
“We thought long and hard and decided to give up our seats and ensure that the plane left full,” he said, adding that he believed it was safer to stay at home than to travel to the airport late at night, with no guarantee they would be able to board, when the city is under lockdown.
Matt Raw, who has lived in Wuhan for the past year with his wife, Ying, and 75-year-old mother, Hazel, who suffers from dementia, were among those on the flight. Raw posted a video from Wuhan airport on Friday morning in which he said they had finally been given permission to fly and were about to pass through airport security.
The coronavirus has now spread to more than 15 countries, with the US and South identifying their first cases of human-to-human transmission. Japan, Germany and Vietnam have already recorded cases in which the infection spread between people.
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems,” The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a briefing in Geneva on Thursday.
“The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China but because of what is happening in other countries,” he said. “Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it.
“We must all act together now to limit further spread ... We can only stop it together.”
Pilots and flight attendants, meanwhile, demanded that airlines stop flights to China, with American Airlines’ pilots filing a lawsuit seeking an immediate halt to services to the country. The Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines pilots, cited “serious, and in many ways still unknown, health threats posed by the coronavirus” in a lawsuit filed in Texas, where the airline is based.
Several major airlines have already suspended or reduced services to China, including British Airways, Air Canada, Lufthansa, KLM and United. The Press Association reported on Friday that Virgin Atlantic had suspended its daily flights between Britain and Shanghai.
The British evacuees are among thousands of foreign nationals who have been trapped in Wuhan since the city was sealed off last week.
Japan has so far brought back around 400 citizens on three flights, with a fourth flight expected next week to collect the remainder of 650 Japanese living in and around Wuhan who had asked to return home. Three people aboard the first evacuation flight on Wednesday tested positive for the virus after landing back in Japan.
The US airlifted about 200 people on Wednesday, with a second flight expected in the coming days. A French plane also left Wuhan on Friday, according to an AFP journalist on board the flight, while Australia and New Zealand were among other countries organising evacuations.
Agencies contributed to this report.