Hong Kong to set up flights to take home passengers from Diamond Princess ship
16 February, 2020
The Hong Kong government will send aircraft to Japan to recreate passengers from the quarantined cruise liner Diamond Princess, where in fact the most coronavirus infections outside China have occurred.
In a statement late on Saturday, the Security Bureau said chartered flights would return Hong Kong residents to the city free of charge once Japanese authorities had confirmed the plan.
The passengers will be asked to undergo a further 2 weeks of quarantine after arriving in Hong Kong, the bureau added.
The cruise ship, owned by Carnival Corp and carrying some 3,700 passengers and crew, has been quarantined in Yokohama since Feb 3, after a guy who disembarked in Hong Kong before it travelled to Japan was identified as having the virus.
There are around 330 Hong Kong residents up to speed, including 260 holding Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong passports and roughly 70 people with foreign ones.
The cruise liner's quarantine is set to end on Wednesday.
In Hong Kong, there were 56 confirmed cases of coronavirus and one death.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam has called on residents to stay indoors as much as possible to curb the chance of a possible community outbreak in the global financial centre where, shopping malls, restaurants and cafes are almost deserted.
A driver wearing protective suits sometimes appears in the bus which thought to carry elderly passengers of the cruise liner Diamond Princess.
Anger has been brewing over Lam's handling of the crisis, with critics contacting her to shut the complete border with mainland China plus some medical employees going on strike.
On Saturday, a huge selection of anti-government protesters, many wearing surgical masks and dressed up in black, marched in multiple neighbourhoods against plans to potentially turn some buildings into coronavirus quarantine centres. In addition they reiterated demands the closure of the mainland China border.
Lam has said such a move will be "inappropriate", "impractical" and "discriminatory".
Latest figures from Beijing on Sunday showed 68,500 cases of the condition and 1,665 deaths, mostly in Hubei province.
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