Hong Kong (AFP)

There are those who were able to flee Wuhan on the "air bridges" erected by their country. But there are all the other foreigners still trapped in the Chinese epicenter of the coronavirus, where they live in anxiety this experience of seclusion and deprivation far from home.

"We want to leave," said Gaurab Pokhrel, a medical student interviewed by AFP from Hong Kong and one of 200 Nepalese who have not been evacuated.

"We can no longer survive like this," he said of the shortages in the few open stores that students, foreigners and Chinese alike, are taking over.

Nearly 60,000 people in China have been infected with the new coronavirus, including more than 1,350 who have died.

And it has been three weeks since almost all of Hubei province - in which is the city of Wuhan where the disease appeared in December - was put de facto under quarantine.

Hundreds of foreigners were able to escape aboard planes specially chartered by their government. But an unknown number of others have not had this chance and now live cut off from the world, completely ignoring the date of their "liberation".

On Monday, there were 27 foreigners among those infected in China. An American and a Japanese perished.

Stuck on the campus of Zhongnan University, Pakistani researcher Ruqia Shaikh explains that most of the students are confined to their dorms, where they watch television.

The university, she told AFP, provides all the necessary food, but at twice their usual price.

"We can no longer eat more and more vegetables and boiled rice. The only physical activity is to walk on the terrace, where we are exposed to the risk" of contamination, she continues.

- Yemenis and Sudanese -

Many of her compatriots want to be repatriated, but she is also worried about returning to her country.

"We don't know how the authorities are going to treat us in Pakistan," she said. "Some students who have left say that the officials treated them very badly."

Islamabad says more than half a thousand Pakistani students are in Wuhan. No evacuation plans have been announced.

Unlike many other countries, Pakistan has maintained flights from China, claiming to control the temperature of all arriving passengers.

Yemen is also clearly not planning to evacuate its 115 nationals currently in Wuhan. Much to the dismay of Fahd al-Tawili, a 31-year-old Yemeni man in quarantine at the Chinese University of Geosciences.

"Everyone except us has been evacuated. Only the Sudanese remain," he said. "When we are finally allowed out, the few stores open are crowded and we have to wait outside a long time to buy almost nothing."

His government, he accuses, turns a deaf ear to requests for repatriation. And the financial aid promised to fellows no longer arrives, according to him.

Another 23-year-old Yemeni, a student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, says the students live "in terror of being infected".

- A small garden -

Last week, Bangladesh evacuated 312 people, mostly students, and planned to exfiltrate 171 others, but the pilots of the national company Biman refused to fly for fear of catching the disease.

"No crew wants to go there. Whoever went there the first time does not want to go back," Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told reporters on Saturday.

His government is trying - for the moment without success - to charter a flight with a Chinese crew.

France, it has evacuated since the end of January 279 people on three flights, but his consul general Olivier Guyonvarch remained in Wuhan with forty compatriots who either do not want to leave the city, or have missed the previous planes.

For the moment, the diplomat has "no information on a fourth plane".

"We have requests for the repatriation of people who are starting to get impatient," he said. "We tell them: we have no way today to get you out."

Others paradoxically say that staying in Wuhan can reduce the risk of contagion.

Australian Edwin Reese is therefore reluctant for his wife to leave Wuhan. "She has a little garden over there with fruits and vegetables. She has everything you need," he said. "Why go out and expose yourself? You'd have to be crazy to do it."

© 2020 AFP