Foreign students stuck in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of a coronavurus outbreak, are launching social media campaigns, making phone calls and writing letters urging their governments to get them out as soon as possible.
Governments globally are grappling with the challenge of how to get their citizens out of China’s Hubei province, where 60mn residents now live under virtual lockdown.
Pakistan said that quarantine regulations prevented it from flying out the more than 500 Pakistani students and their families from Wuhan.
Bangladesh and India said they were putting aircraft on standby.
Mohamed Rauf, 30, a Pakistani master’s student, told Reuters that he and around 40 others were locked in their Wuhan dormitory for all but four hours a day.
“How long will the lockdown be? What will we do? Just count down our days?” he said, adding they had been calling for an evacuation plan from their government for ten days.
Pakistan’s Health Minister Dr Zafar Mirza said that while he understands that the students are anxious, there is no current plan to evacuate them – but the embassy was providing support.
“We are following Chinese regulations according to which the whole place is under quarantine. As they open it, we will decide accordingly,” he told Reuters by phone.
Another Pakistani student in Wuhan, who declined to be identified because he feared reprisals from the authorities, said that the students had been in contact with their embassy but it had not responded in two days.
“They say that we cannot evacuate. Why can’t they evacuate us? Other countries have evacuated,” he said. “We are thankful to the Chinese government ... but we are not the responsibility of the Chinese government. We are the responsibility of our government.”
The US airlifted nearly 200 Americans from Wuhan on Wednesday, and South Korea was yesterday preparing up to four evacuation flights.
In one video posted on social media, a group of Pakistani students who said they were in Wuhan chanted “please save us” while one man asked the government to “take some measures to get us out of here”.
China has become a major destination for South Asian university students in recent years, fuelled in part by scholarships offered as China expands its influence in the region through President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure programme.
Pakistan and China are very close allies.
More than 400 Bangladeshis, mostly students, are stranded in Wuhan.
“Wuhan has become a ghost town,” Rakibil Hafiz, a Bangladeshi engineering student at Hubei University of Technology, told Reuters via WhatsApp. “There is nothing we can do. We are all stuck in the dormitory. We are very worried. I want to go home.”
Meanwhile, Pakistani athletes in China have to stay a little longer as airlines have stopped operations due to coronavirus outbreak in the country, it transpired yesterday.
“They will have to stay for a few more days as there is no flight operation from Nanjing to Islamabad during the next few days,” a senior official of the Athletics Federation of Pakistan said.
“I am in constant contact with the travel agent, and probably the flights will reopen their operations by February 4, and our athletes will return by the first available flight,” he said.
Airlines have suspended services to China while, the World Health Organisation (WHO), which initially downplayed the severity of a disease that has now killed 170 nationwide, warned all governments to be “on alert” as it weighed whether to declare a global health emergency.
National athletes including Arshad Nadeem, Olympian Mehboob Ali, Mohamed Naeem, Uzair-ur-Rehman and Samiullah are in Nanjing for training purposes.
“They had to undergo training there until the end of next month but are returning due to outbreak of coronavirus in China,” the official told the newspaper.
The training tour had been arranged through the collaboration of Pakistan’s embassy in China.
The federation has asked the embassy to send the athletes back due to fear of flu-like virus which is causing havoc in China.
“We are in contact with our athletes. They are safe. The place where they are staying is quite safe and hopefully they will return safely,” the official said.
Because of the virus, several international events China was going to host were either postponed or moved to other countries.
Asian and Oceania boxing qualifiers for 2020 Tokyo Olympics, in which Pakistani fighters were also set to feature, were scheduled to be hosted by Wuhan in the first and second week of next month were moved to Jordan.
The qualifiers will now be held from March 3-14 in Amman, Jordan’s capital.