An Air India B747 aircraft on Saturday morning brought 324 Indians back to India after evacuating them from Wuhan in China, which has been badly hit by the novel coronavirus, PTI reported. The plane reached New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport at 7.30 am.

An Air India spokesperson said five doctors from the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Delhi and a paramedic were present on board. The flight had departed from Delhi airport at 1.17 pm on Friday. The airline said another flight to evacuate Indians from Wuhan will leave Delhi at 12.50 pm on Saturday.

The flight that landed on Saturday morning had three minors, 211 students and 110 working professionals, the spokesperson said. Six Indians were offloaded before the plane took off, as screening showed they were running a high temperature, ANI reported.

The passengers will be kept in isolation for 14 days at the Indo-Tibetan Border Force centre in Chhawla in Delhi. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had said on Friday that it had made adequate quarantine camps at Manesar and Chhawla.

India had reported its first case on Thursday, a woman from Thalassery in Kerala, who had returned from China earlier this month. The World Health Organization on Thursday declared the outbreak a global epidemic.

At least 259 people have died so far in China due to the coronavirus, and the number of infections has surged to 11,791, the Chinese government said on Saturday, AFP reported. The country’s National Health Commission said in its daily report that 46 more people died of the virus on Friday. All but one of them died in Hubei province. A Communist Party of China official expressed “remorse” that the government had not acted faster to prevent the spread of the virus.

Italy declares state of emergency, first cases reported from Russia

Meanwhile, the Italian government declared a state of emergency on Friday to speed up efforts to contain the coronavirus, AFP reported. So far, two cases have been confirmed in the capital Rome. Italian media said the state of emergency will last six months.

On Thursday, Italy had banned all flights to and from China, after information that two Chinese tourists on vacation in Italy tested positive for the virus. The police have sealed off the room where the couple had been staying at a hotel in Rome. Incoming Chinese tourists are being tested for the virus. A 42-year-old Romanian working at the hotel has been hospitalised for tests.

Russia reported its first two cases of coronavirus on Friday and said the infected people were Chinese citizens who had been quarantined, Reuters reported. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said the first case was discovered in Tyumen region in West Siberia, and the other in Russia’s Far East. Earlier this week, Russia had closed its eastern border with China.

“They are under strict supervision, isolated and are receiving the necessary treatment,” Golikova said. “Both are Chinese citizens.”

Real number of affected people could be much higher: Study

Medical journal Lancet said on Friday that the real number of people affected in Wuhan could be as high as 75,000. “New modelling research, published in The Lancet, estimates that up to 75,800 individuals in the Chinese city of Wuhan may have been infected with 2019 novel coronavirus [2019-nCoV] as of January 25, 2020,” the publication said.

“If the transmissibility of 2019-nCoV were similar everywhere domestically and over time, we inferred that epidemics are already growing exponentially in multiple major cities of China with a lag time behind the Wuhan outbreak of about 1–2 week,” the summary to the report said. Lead author Professor Joseph Wu from the University of Hong Kong said some large cities outside China could also become epicentres of local outbreaks.