Virus havoc at Heathrow
Hundreds left in lockdown on runway as 96% of medics say NHS isn’t ready for bug
HUNDREDS of passengers were trapped inside locked planes at Heathrow yesterday as panic over coronavirus spread.
Travellers were stopped from disembarking as fellow passengers fell ill with suspected cases of the virus.
Sources said the disruption has become a daily occurrence at major airports as part of enhanced measures to stop more cases entering the UK.
As public anxiety over the global outbreak grew last night, official figures showed that the number of people submitting themselves for testing across the UK had more than doubled in the last three days alone.
A total of 2,964 people have now been tested – 1,606 of them since Tuesday. Of those, nine have so far tested positive.
Health bosses believe more British cases are inevitable. But of 500 frontline health workers polled for Channel 4, 96 per cent believe the NHS is not prepared, with 93 per cent saying there is not enough protection for staff.
One unnamed GP, who is pregnant, said she was ‘genuinely scared’.
Passengers were held for up to an hour at Heathrow yesterday. Travellers on a British Airways flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and a United Airlines service from San Francisco were prevented from getting off because of precautionary measures. Several other flights were also said to have been affected.
Andy West, from Henley- onThames, Oxfordshire, arriving on United Airlines flight 901, said passengers were warned they could be on the tarmac for a while.
He said staff took a passenger to the back of the plane. ‘We were told to stay seated until authorities came on board and he [the captain] said seven other flights had landed and had a similar situation,’ he said. ‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried, my mind started to race.’
A passenger on BA flight 34 from Malaysia said health workers wearing protective clothing put a screen around one family before evacuating the plane row by row.
The number of deaths globally climbed to 1,384 last night with 64,500 confirmed cases worldwide.
Last night, Beijing ordered everybody returning to the city to go into quarantine for 14 days – or risk severe punishment.
It came as Egypt confirmed the first coronavirus case in Africa. Global health expert Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, added: ‘This virus is the one which probably concerns me the most out of everything I’ve worked on.’ As panic grew, a YouGov poll suggested 14 per cent of people in Britain would avoid contact with those of Chinese origin or appearance. Pictures showed a deserted Chinatown in London and legal adviser Jason Ngan, from
Manchester, said anti-Asian racism in his city is on the rise. ‘It’s exposing all these underlying prejudices towards Chinese people,’ he told The Guardian. Health officials said they had set up ‘enhanced monitoring’ at British airports of direct flights from China, Thailand, Japan, Republic of Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Macau.
Every flight from those countries plays an in-flight message over the broadcast system asking passengers to report any illness and leaflets are distributed describing coronavirus symptoms. On landing, every captain has to provide a formal assurance – known as a ‘general aircraft declaration’ – that no passengers are unwell before they are allowed to disembark.
If anyone on board is unwell, the plane has to taxi to one of the ‘health hubs’ set up at airports by
Public Health England, where a doctor enters the aircraft and checks the unwell passenger. Contact details for those sitting in the ‘vicinity’ of the unwell patient are taken before anyone is allowed to disembark.
Department for Transport guidance says if the patient subsequently tests positive for coronavirus, those within two rows will have to go into two-week isolation.
British Airways said a customer was examined on flight BA34 and passengers had to wait an hour before disembarking. United Airlines said it had ‘provided assistance... following reports of an individual becoming unwell onboard’.
‘My mind started to race’