Medical support team workers leave Wuhan for hometowns

ISLAMABAD

Around 7,000 healthcare workers on Tuesday left China’s Wuhan city for their hometowns as the life slowly returns to normal in the ground zero of coronavirus outbreak, local media reported.

The photos published by the state-run China Daily newspaper showed an official seeing off medical workers who were later escorted by police to airport.

"Nearly 7,000 medical workers in the assistance team supporting Central China's Hubei province set out from the capital, Wuhan, and went back to their hometowns, marking the largest scale departure of medics since the first group left on March 17," the newspaper reported.

The country's civil aviation authorities arranged 51 chartered planes for healthcare workers to carry them to their hometowns.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese government brought 42,000 medical personnel from other parts of the country to join the battle against coronavirus, said the daily.

On March 24, authorities in Hubei said that the months-long lockdown will be lifted in Wuhan on April 8.

The city of 11 million was put under lockdown on Jan. 23 in order to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which has so far claimed more than 3,000 lives and infected more than 82,000 people across mainland China.

After originating in Wuhan last December, the virus currently has spread to at least 178 countries and regions across the world, with its epicenter shifting to Europe, while China has largely come out of the crisis.

The virus has killed more than 39,000 people and infected over 803,000 globally, while some 172,600 people recovered from the disease, according to figures collated by the U.S.-based Johns Hopkins University.