Teacher caught coronavirus while visiting her cancer-stricken mother

A teacher has revealed how she contracted the coronavirus after visiting her mother who was dying of cancer in China.

Muying Shi, 37, flew to her birthplace in Wuhan – the epicentre of the deadly new infection that has now killed more than 300 – in early January to help nurse her ill mother Liping Wang, 63.

Ms Shi, who has lived in London for five years, is now under quarantine in the locked-down city’s Hospital 8 after CT scans showed the infection in her lungs, and has no idea if she can return to her home in Britain, the Sunday Mirror reported.

She said: ‘I am really scared… I fear for my life but I can’t think about it because I would just break down. I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.’

Ms Shi, a private language tutor in Colindale, north London, is in hospital along with her 67-year-old father Xianging, also being treated for the virus.

She revealed how she is sharing a room – which she is not permitted to leave – with two elderly people, one of whom uses an oxygen tank to breathe, while her mother is three miles away in a different hospital in the final stages of rectal cancer.

She said: ‘It’s grim, to say the least. Nobody knows anything about the virus so there’s no proper treatment. My dad is I are being given painkillers and antibiotics, but there is no cure.’

Some of her fellow patients are receiving no medicine at all, and Ms Shi can hear them through the walls shouting at medical staff, she said.

‘I’m sitting here knowing I’m going to lose my mum and I just can’t stand the thought of this virus taking my father,’ Ms Shi said.

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She added that she speaks with her father on her phone, and he keeps crying because they cannot visit her mother, who is ‘just taking painkillers and waiting to die’.

Ms Shi said that doctors and nurses are wearing full protection suits, but patients can tell they are still nervous, and the staff who deliver their food are speculating it may be contaminated.

British citizens left stranded in Wuhan after missing the first airlift out of the coronavirus-hit city will touch down in the UK today.

This second batch of evacuees will join 83 patients quarantined in Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral following their rescue from Hubei province.

A leaked email seen by the Liverpool Echo shows the medical compound’s chief executive Janelle Holmes telling staff: ‘I wanted you to be amongst the first to know that tomorrow morning we will be receiving an additional group of citizens from Wuhan.

‘We were asked to accommodate a small number of UK citizens who did not make the flight on Thursday from China with the last group.

‘The same safeguarding arrangements and support are being put in place to get them here that were used for the first group of guests.’

It is not clear how many patients form this second wave, but the hospital boss does reveal that none of them is displaying any symptoms – yet the infection does have a 14-day incubation period during which time the bug can still spread.

The first group of evacuees were flown to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire before being whisked 170 miles to the North West in a convoy of buses driven by drivers who bizarrely did not wear face masks.

The identities of the evacuees remain closely guarded by Public Health England, but many who missed out on Thursday’s airlift have since been critical of the government that they were denied a spot.

Adam Bridgeman spoke of being stranded with his Chinese wife and newborn baby after being given less than two hours’ notice that his ride out of the locked-down city was taking off.

He pledged to stay after he was told that seats on the jumbo jet were only for British citizens – meaning his spouse and child would have to stay behind.

British mother Natalie Francis told of the ‘ terrifying’ and ‘life-changingly awful’ evacuation from Wuhan with her son Jamie.

They are part of the group of 83 evacuees from Wuhan who are being quarantined for 14 days inside Arrowe Park Hospital ‘behind a locked door’.

The quarantine is long enough for any symptoms of the deadly coronavirus to show.

There are roughly 100 people suspected to have the virus at Ms Shi’s hospital. Almost 60 million people are locked down in Chinese cities.