More evacuees coming home
Second plane returning more Canadians from outbreak epicentre
A second Canadian plane left the quarantined region of Hubei, China, on Monday, bearing more Canadians who have asked to return from the centre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, the federal government says.
Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne said there was room for about 200 passengers aboard the flight from Wuhan.
The plane is bringing back the last group of Canadians who want to be repatriated, said Champagne, who is travelling with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Africa and the Middle East.
There were 236 Canadians hoping to board the plane from a city that has been under quarantine for weeks as Chinese authorities try to contain the virus’s spread, Canadian officials had said Sunday.
The government plans to unite the latest batch of evacuees with the 213 Canadians and their families who left Wuhan last week, and who are already under a mandatory quarantine at Canadian Forces Base Trenton.
Public health officials and Canadian Forces personnel are working to make the rooms as comfortable as possible, including installing wireless internet access. Canadian teacher Wayne Duplessis and his family boarded the plane in Wuhan. They had been planning to hunker down in the quarantined city until they realized they were running low on supplies.
“It was getting desperate,” Duplessis said from the airport while waiting for the flight.
While Duplessis and his 15year-old son Wyatt are Canadian, his wife, Emily Tjandra, and their older son, Adryan Candra, 38, are Indonesian. The Canadian consulate was able to put a rush on Tjandra’s and Candra’s visas so they could stay together as a family.
The family is ecstatic to be coming back and to know that they are safe, Duplessis said.
He described Wuhan as “a city in pain.”
“It’s a city I love. I feel great sadness for them.”
Champagne said the government is also monitoring the well-being of 285 Canadians quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in the Japanese port city of Yokohama, just outside Tokyo, where an eighth Canadian is among those who have recently tested positive for the virus.
The cruise line is following the Japanese health ministry’s “disembarkation protocols to provide medical care for these new cases,” the company said in a news release.
The latest Canadian patient will join seven others who were taken earlier to Japanese hospitals for treatment and monitoring.