Coronavirus: Americans from quarantined cruise ship flown from Japan - BBC News

the first of two planes carrying hundreds of US citizens from a virus-affected

cruise

ship

quarantined

off the coast of Japan arrived in the United States the plane was chartered by the US government and landed at the Air Base the Travis Air Force which is located in Fairfield in California, you can see it here, it arrived in Australia, Canada, South Korea and Italy also made plans to evacuate their citizens. Japanese officials said the number of infections on the Diamond Princess

ship

has risen to nearly 400, making it the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Well, in China the outbreak is known to have infected more than 70,000 people.

More than 2,000 new cases were reported on Monday, most of which were in Hebei province, as Freya Cole now reports that these images released by Chinese state media show a sparkling clean hospital floor. with beds carefully prepared and lined up with perfect precision for victims of your novel

coronavirus

, but this unverified video was shared on social media paints a very different picture, the person who posted it says this is the situation in the emergency department of the provincial People's Hospital on Sunday afternoon, the hospital is in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, it is overcrowded and overcrowded, the Chinese Communist Party has insisted that it is succeeding in curbing the outbreak, strict travel bans apply, especially in the that the citizens of the province are ordered to stay home unless there is an emergency, but some public health experts say that quarantine is not the only answer, this is a respiratory virus that has efficient community spread which is not something that really can be expected to be contained, it spread for probably weeks in China before anyone knew about it since at least November so it had seeded the world and it's likely to get mixed up with our cold and flu season in many different countries because most cases are mild and go unrecognized so I don't think this is something that can be contain and that we really need to do We went from the containment mentality to mitigation because we are really wasting time and resources on containment.

The latest official figures reveal that there has been a decline in new cases, but the numbers remain high. More than 70,000 scientists around the world are hard at work creating a vaccine, but until then it's still a volatile global health situation Freya Kohl BBC News and we're going to bring you live now to California at the Fairfield base f we can see the Base from Travis Air Force in Fairfield we can see the second plane carrying US citizens just arrived there now so there have been two planes carrying a few hundred US passengers passengers aboard the Diamond Princess and this is the second that we can see here now, but what's really going on aboard that

cruise

ship right now, our Japan correspondent Rupert Wingfield Hayes told us rather if there's been another big jump in the number of confirmed cases on the ship again today , the Japanese government is now moving pretty quickly to try to test everyone on board, they tested another 504 people today and of those 504 499 were found to be pos ives to have the virus so that's around 20% of people tested today and that's still big increases yesterday and Saturday 70 new cases on Sunday 60 70 cases on Saturday this points very clearly to the minus a strong suspicion that the quarantine on board that ship is not working properly because we are now 13 days into the quarantine period of what is supposed to be a two-week quarantine, and yet today we have 99 new cases and that, of course, is one of the reasons why when various governments, including the American ones, have moved to get their citizens off the ship, the first evacuation took place overnight, two planes came from the United States to pick up to about 350 Americans who came on board and recently, in the last few hours, played in California, where they're going to be

quarantined

again, it's a ship, Rupert, you would have thought that would mean that Since it was easy to contain something like this, what do the authorities say about why the quarantine is not effective?

Well, the Japanese government has not made a clear response to that accusation, they continue their line that quarantine is a safe place and the best place for such people to be quarantined, but that has been questioned by experts from all over the world. , even from places like Harvard University in the United States where health experts have said that a ship is not a good place to quarantine people because you can keep people in their cabins but there is consistent air. There is no conditioning system that circulates the air around the boat. If the virus is airborne, it can enter air conditioning systems.

If it is not in the air, but in drops, the crew can pass it. The crew is still working. They have yet to make food. and take it to all passengers on board and there is a possibility of contact infection so health experts say everyone should have been tested and taken off that ship ASAP two weeks ago and that didn't happen what's wrong with ashore Rupert IC celebrations for the Emperor's birthday have been postponed to this weekend any other changes to daily life in Japan well its still pretty quiet I have to say though infections are slowly increasing in Japan and we have seen infections about you know a number of different areas of

japan

appearing in several different areas people are pretty calm here but the government is now taking steps to reduce some public activities like you said the birthday of the Emperor usu ally the emperor He comes out and greets thousands of people who gather in front of the Imperial Palace on his birthday, which has been canceled because they are concerned that so many people gather in one place and now there is also talk about what is going to happen with the Tokyo marathon on March 1, it has not been confirmed yet, but there are unconfirmed reports that Tokyo is considering only allowing the professional athletes from participating and discourage or even prevent all amateurs from participating in this year's marathon.

Let's go back now briefly to the United States, where the second plane that had been bringing US citizens home from Japan landed, this is actually San Antonio in Texas, the plane won going back to California and this one here going back to Texas where the passengers who they will be facing another quarantine for a corner of virus controls in the united states these photos come to us from san antonio in