Jordan’s Petra News Agency reported that a plane carrying 71 Jordanian and Arab students arrived at the Queen Alia International Airport at dawn on Saturday after being evacuated from China’s Wuhan region following the outbreak of the new coronavirus.
The Royal Jordanian aircraft is the first official carrier of a country to enter the Wuhan airport for evacuation.
According to the Jordanian Health Minister Saleh Al-Kharabsheh, the evacuated passengers onboard are 55 Jordanian students, seven Palestinians, three Omanis, a Lebanese citizen, three Tunisians, and a Bahraini.
The minister stated that the students will be transferred to the Al-Bashir Hospital (Amman Governmental Hospital) for examination to ensure that they are free of disease, without entering the airport building as a precaution.
The Secretary-General of the Jordanian Ministry of Health, Hikmat Abu al-Foul, said that the Lebanese and the Arab students are in good health. However, he added that they will be placed in quarantine as a precaution in the isolation departments of the hospital and will receive treatment by well equipped medical teams.
He stressed that all procedures within the isolation have been prepared to ensure their safety, so they can continue with their trip with no concerns.
He added that the examination will begin on Sunday after the arrival of the medical strips prepared for examination along with the necessary equipment. The aircraft has also been put in solitary to be sterilized over the course of five days.
It has been confirmed by the Lebanese minister of health Hamad Hassan that, until now, no Lebanese has been affected by the coronavirus in China so far, and that no one has entered Lebanese soil carrying the virus, which makes Lebanon coronavirus-free as of this moment.
Chinese authorities announced on Saturday that the number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus rose to 304 with 45 new fatalities in Hubei province, while the number of infected with the deadly respiratory virus is reported to be nearly 12 thousand people.
The Chinese province of Hubei reported 1921 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday.
