Thirty new returnees from Wuhan arrived in Istres (Bouches-du-Rhône) on Sunday from the United Kingdom. They had stopped there from China, the epicenter of the global coronavirus epidemic, a spokeswoman for the military base told AFP. This is the third wave of returnees arriving in France from the Chinese province of Hubei, after the approximately 180 people landed on January 31 and the 120 people who landed in Istres on February 2.
35 people "of French nationality"
These new returnees will be placed in quarantine for fourteen days, the maximum duration of incubation of the virus, at the national higher school of the officers of firefighters (Ensosp) of Aix-en-Provence, where approximately 80 people are already confined. All the other returnees are in a holiday center in Carry-le-Rouet, on the Blue Coast, some 30 kilometers west of Marseille. The thirty or so new returnees left China on Sunday morning local time on a London-chartered plane to evacuate nearly 200 people in total. In the United Kingdom, the aircraft made a stopover at Brize Norton air base, about 120 kilometers west of the British capital.
The Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, said Friday that the passengers disembarked in Istres on Sunday must be 38. According to the latest information from the prefecture of Bouches-du-Rhône on Sunday, they would ultimately be "35 on board, from French nationality". According to a report communicated to AFP Sunday by the prefecture, the previous returnees arrived in France are exactly 225 in Carry-le-Rouet, most of them French, and 78 in Aix-en-Provence, including 19 French. These figures changed during the week, as some of the passengers arriving from China had to be temporarily transferred to Marseille's Timone hospital, to ensure that they were not carriers of the coronavirus. All returnees from Carry-le-Rouet and Aix-en-Provence have been tested twice since their arrival, and none of them have contracted the coronavirus.
Over 800 dead in Asia
The toll of the epidemic in mainland China reached 811 dead on Sunday, with another death in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines. It now exceeds that of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) which killed 774 people worldwide in 2002-2003.