Passengers on last Wuhan-Rome flight virus free

The last Rome-bound flight to leave Wuhan before the Chinese city was closed off arrived at Fiumicino airport at dawn on Thursday.

The 202 passengers were transported by bus to a special airport infrastructure where health workers decked out in sanitary suits with goggles and masks were waiting to conduct body temperature checks to see if the travelers might be carrying coronavirus.

The passengers filled out questionnaires detailing where they had been before passing through a body temperature screening.

A special Red Cross ambulance with a sealed area inside and special air filters was standing by to transport any ill passengers to the hospital.

However, there were no cases of fever among the passengers.

The illnesses from a newly identified coronavirus first appeared last month in Wuhan, an industrial and transportation hub in central China's Hubei province.

The vast majority of mainland China's 571 cases have been in the city.

Other cases have been reported in the United States, Japan, South Korea and Thailand.

One case was confirmed Thursday in Hong Kong after one was earlier confirmed in Macao. Most cases outside China were people from Wuhan or who had recently traveled there.

A total of 17 people have died, all of them in and around Wuhan. Their average age was 73, with the oldest 89 and the youngest 48.

The coronavirus family includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious illnesses, such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-2003 and killed about 800 people, and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, which developed from camels.

Many countries are screening travellers from China for illness, especially those arriving from Wuhan.