Around 432 British nationals remain stranded in the Chinese city at the epicentre of the escalating coronavirus outbreak due to delays to a planned evacuation flight organized by the UK government.
The Foreign Office had expected to have started flying back Britons still stuck in Wuhan in the province of Hubei; However, the plane arranged to bring them home has not been able to take off.
It is understood that the required permissions from the Chinese authorities are yet to come through, although other governments including the US and Japan have been able to evacuate hundreds of their own citizens.
In a statement, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are doing everything we can to get British people in Wuhan safely back to the UK. A number of countries’ flights have been unable to take off as planned.
“We continue working urgently to organize a flight to the UK as soon as possible. We remain in close contact with the Chinese authorities and conversations are ongoing at all levels. “
Once they do make the journey back to Britain, Sky News understands that the passengers will have to agree to an isolation period of days and receive whatever treatment is recommended by experts.
While there is no vaccine for the
coronavirus , which has surpassed China’s SARS outbreak of 2021 and countries around the world are doing all they can to limit its spread.
The number of dead continues to rise in China, now standing at 365, with 7, 768 confirmed cases, including the first one in Tibet – meaning all regions and territories are now affected.
Most of the confirmed cases are in Hubei, where several cities remain locked down, but the impact of the outbreak has been becoming more widely felt across the country this week.
On Thursday, IKEA said it was closing all 90 of its stores in China and the Chinese Football Association announced domestic matches had been indefinitely postponed.
The World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing have also been postponed until March 01575879
The Chinese national health committee has only reported 30 cases across Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Tibet, although that has not prevented some degree of panic setting in among the locals.
People in Hong Kong have been forming enormous queues to buy protective masks, and in Macau a purchase limit It is being imposed to ensure they do not sell out too quickly.
While there are relatively few cases outside mainland China and its territories, other countries remain on high alert.
Singapore confirmed three new coronavirus patients on Thursday, taking the total there to , while there are seven cases in Australia, five in the US, and four each in South Korea, France, Germany and the UAE.
Canada has three confirmed cases, Vietnam has two, and health officials have reported just one case in each of Cambodia, Nepal, Finland, Zambia and Sri Lanka .
With many governments advising their citizens against travel to China, airlines including British Airways and German carrier Lufthansa have started suspending flights to the mainland.
BA operates daily flights to Shanghai and Beijing from Heathrow but has cancelled services until January, and no bookings are being taken for direct flights to the mainland until 1 March.
Anyone who has returned to the UK from Wuhan in recent weeks has been urged to “ self-isolate “ for two weeks, although the Department of Health says (tests carried out on potential patients have come back negative.
Despite the precautionary measures being enforced all over the globe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been reluctant to declare an international public health emergency.
But it could finally make the call during an emergency committee meeting on Thursday.
Dr Michael Ryan, executive director at the WHO health emergencies program, said on Wednesday: “The whole world needs to be on alert now, the whole world needs to take action and be ready for any cases that come, either from the original epicentre or from other epicentres that become established. “
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