Britain is getting ready to evacuate British citizens from the Chinese province at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak and is attempting to identify how many want to leave, a cabinet minister has said.
Britons in Hubei province, where the virus began, are being asked to contact the consulate if they want to be airlifted, according to Grant Shapps.
The transport secretary was speaking as British citizens expressed frustration at what was said to be a lack of communication and contrasted the UK response unfavourably with the rapid reaction of other states to airlift their nationals.
Many British nationals on social media were also discussing rumours that an announcement about flights would be made within hours.
“We don’t have a list of people in the region so we keep on putting the message out,” Shapps told Sky News, which reported that Britain and China would work on a possible evacuation of UK citizens from Hubei in the next few days.
“Not everybody wants to be repatriated but we are working on arrangements with other international colleagues to do that.”
In Wuhan, some UK citizens complained of what they described as a lack of clarity on the part of the British government, but there was also confusion about what Britain’s departure from the European Union would mean in terms of any partnerships with other EU states.
“People want to know if there permission from the Chinese government for the flights to leave,” Kathleen Bell told the Guardian.
She had yet to contact a Foreign Office helpline number but added that Britons on social medial had been gathering lists of names themselves in recent days.
“One of the deciding factors for a lot of people though is whether they will be allowed to bring their Chinese spouses or children with them.”
The Twitter account of Britain’s embassy in Beijing, UK in China, has been posting the numbers for a 24-hour helpline that British citizens in Hubei can call.
As almost 1,300 new cases were confirmed on Monday in China and the death toll rose to more than 100, the latest official advice in the UK is for anyone travelling from the affected areas of China to isolate themselves regardless of whether they have symptoms. Those who feel unwell are to be quarantined.
Peter Openshaw, professor of medicine at Imperial College London and a former adviser to the government on the Sars pandemic, said “every possible precaution” needed to be taken and predicted that self-quarantine at home was likely to be part of the response in Britain.
“It’s undoubted that this is something that we need to be very concerned about. I don’t think we need to panic but we need to be very concerned,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.
Asked about whether the National Health Service had the necessary resources to deal with the crisis, Openshaw added: “I think there is going to have to be a lot of self-quarantine and this is part of the government policy, that people should quarantine themselves at home while results are awaited.
“There are many things that we don’t know at the moment and a particular concern at the moment is that transmission may be occurring among people who are not symptomatic. The science on that is not really very strong. We need to know a lot more about the asymptomatic disease.”