Health, Government - Australia To Evacuate From Wuhan
A sixth person in Australia has been diagnosed with the 2019-nCoV coronavirus, and the federal government is now preparing to evacuate "isolated and vulnerable Australians" who were trapped in China by the outbreak of the potentially deadly bug.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Federal Government's priority will be on getting children and elderly people out the virus-hit city of Wuhan, taking them to Christmas Island for quarantine.
"There is rather a limited window here and we are moving very, very swiftly to ensure we can put this plan together and put the operation together," Mr. Morrison said. "I stress that this will be done on a last-in, first-out basis."
He continued, "Those who have been there who do not have an established support infrastructure where they're living, they would have been shorter-term travelers to that area, they would not have been living there for many years and we're particularly focused on the more vulnerable components of that population."
The US ran a Kalitta Airlines chartered flight with about 240 people out of Wuhan earlier. It's making a stopover in Anchorage for refueling and to check the passengers for symptoms of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. It will then will proceed to the March Air Reserve Base in southern California more than 100 kilometers outside of Los Angeles, where passengers could be quarantined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for as long as two weeks.
Japan evacuated 206 of its people out of Wuhan; four have been taken to hospital for isolation after displaying flu-like symptoms.
Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton says a man in his 60s is the state's second case of coronavirus, sixth overall for the country. The patient was traveling in Wuhan, came here, got sick on 23 January, sought treatment at Monash Hospital, and is now under home quarantine.
"The man was mostly at home and had isolated himself when unwell but he had gone out to a restaurant called The House of Delight for a short period of time," said Victoria's chief health officer Dr. Brett Sutton. "That restaurant has been followed up with and those who were there at the same time, whose contact details we have, we are following up with. But obviously that restaurant is OK to go to now. People don't need to avoid that area or indeed anywhere else people have been, even if infectious at the time."