Britons have been told to leave Italy and go home as the country shuts down everything in a drastic bid to stop a coronavirus outbreak.
The nation is grappling with the worst epidemic in the world outside China and more than 10,000 people have now caught the infection there. 631 have died.
The UK Foreign Office today urged British people to fly home while they still can as the Italian government urges tourists to leave and airlines are cancelling flights.
In a statement officials said: ‘The Italian authorities have advised against travel for tourism purposes throughout Italy, and that tourists already on holiday in Italy should end their travel, unless it is necessary, to return to the place where they live.’
Plane tickets out of Italy are quickly becoming hot property after British Airways, Easyjet, Jet2 and WizzAir cancelled all of their routes between Italy and the UK.
Ryanair is flying normally until Saturday, when it will stop for almost a month, and Easyjet said it would operate ‘rescue flights’ in the coming days.
One couple from Hertfordshire spent £600 in their desperate bid to get out of the country, driving through the night from Milan to Turin to ensure a seat to London.
Others who have returned in the last 24 hours said the situation was nowhere near this bad when they left and many now face two weeks in isolation at home in case they’ve caught the coronavirus.
Sam and Mark McVey, from Hertfordshire, spent £600 on their desperate bid to get out of Italy last night and had to drive from Milan to Turin after their flight was cancelled
Torino Airport in Turin, northern Italy, is pictured almost deserted today as Italians are barred from travelling and tourists are being urged to go home
A statement from the Foreign Office today said: ‘British nationals remain able to depart Italy without restriction.
‘Airports remain open throughout Italy. However, the Italian authorities have advised against travel for tourism purposes throughout Italy, and that tourists already on holiday in Italy should end their travel, unless it is necessary, to return to the place where they live.
‘Airline schedules are subject to change and some flights are being cancelled.
‘We therefore advise all remaining British tourists in Italy to contact their airline operators to arrange return to the UK as soon as possible.’
Numerous airlines have cancelled flights and Ryanair, one of the last remaining British fliers, will stop its service from Saturday.
Britons must now abandon their holidays and try to get a seat on one of the last flights home.
Sam and Mark McVey, from Hertfordshire, stumped up a massive £600 for their flights home this morning after driving 90 miles from Milan to Turin to catch it.
Their flight from Milan was cancelled after the resort they were staying in shut down over the weekend.
Sam, 52, told MailOnline: ‘We arrived at the resort in the Three Valleys, Champoluc, in Val d’Aosta, on Saturday. Sunday, our first day on the slopes was fantastic.
‘But on Monday morning we found that everything had been shut down.
‘The ski-lifts were closed, all the restaurants and bars were closed and most of the shops. Fortunately we found a little deli that was open and we bought some bread, eggs and pasta.
‘We changed our EasyJet flight from Milan to come back the next day. But it got cancelled overnight. I thought we would be stranded in Italy with no way to get home.
‘So we stayed up all night looking for flights and managed to get this Ryanair flight from Turin. We left the resort at 4am managed to get one of the last flights out of Italy.’
Meanwhile, travellers arriving from Italy say they have received conflicting advice about how to act on their return.
Passengers arriving on Ryanair flights from Turin and Venice have told how misleading information is still on display at London’s Stansted Airport stating only visitors to Italy’s ‘red zone’ in the north must self-isolate.
But the latest advice from Public Health England is that travellers from all of Italy must stay at home for 14 days whether or not they have any symptoms.
Retired couple Michael and Wendy Bull from Harlow, Essex, must now self-isolate for 14 days after spending a weekend break in the Italian Alps near Turin.
Mr Bull, 67, told MailOnline: ‘Ryanair staff told us that we must self-isolate for 14 days after arriving from Italy.
‘But the notice board in the arrivals hall says you only need to self-isolate if you have been in the red zone – Lombardy and other regions that have been worst affected.
‘We know we must self-isolate for 14 days but that not what the notice boards are saying.
‘We normally look after our grandchildren and we have a wedding and a funeral to go to, but we want to do the right thing and stay at home.
‘Our daughter-in-law has already got us some shopping in so we should be ok.’
Finance worker Ricardo Traini told how he would book an apartment to spare his flat-mates from possible exposure to the virus, after returning from Italy.
Mr Traini, 34, from east London, told MailOnline: ‘I went to the Turin area to visit my relatives. But now I understand I must stay away from everyone for 14 days.
‘I am trying to book and AirBnB because I share a flat and I don’t want to infect my flat-mates.’
Self-employed worker Josh Wardle told how he will lose hundreds of pounds from self-isolating after visiting his girlfriend in Turin.
Michael and Wendy Bull, from Essex, said they will now have to miss a wedding and a funeral while they self-isolate for two weeks, while finance worker Ricardo Traini said he will have to rent a room somewhere so he doesn’t put his flatmates at risk
24-year-old Josh Wardle, from Derbyshire, said he is self-employed and will lose money now that he has to go into isolation
The 24-year-old from Derbyshire, told MailOnline: ‘I am a stair-lift engineer and if I don’t work I don’t get paid. But I’m going to follow the advice and self-isolate for two weeks.
‘When I went to Italy a week ago this was not an issue. Turin was not in the red zone. Now it’s like a war zone.
‘But I didn’t got out. We stayed at her apartment and got some shopping delivered. I had not seen my girlfriend for months so I was determined to go.’
People in Italy are facing increasingly difficult trips home to the UK after British Airways and Jet2 yesterday announced they were cancelling all flights between the two countries.
Ryanair will continue to fly as normal until Saturday – with customers in Italy able to fly home before it stops all international flights from the virus-hit nation until April 8.
EasyJet has cancelled all of its flights between Italy and the UK.
Italian airline Alitalia has stopped flying out of Milan Malpensa and limited flights from Milan Linate to only domestic routes, but it continues to fly internationally out of Rome. Budget Spanish airline Vuelling is also running some flights.
A couple flying into London from Venice last night claimed they were given forms to fill out in case health officials had to track them down if a passenger was diagnosed – but nobody collected the forms.
And a family who returned from northern Italy in half-term were reportedly told they did not need to self-isolate but, when one of them fell ill, only two were quarantined in a hospital to wait for test results which were eventually negative. The daughter was allowed to go to school.
Thousands of Brits returning from Italy have said they are confused and frustrated by the Government’s travel advice, with some passengers admitting they had no idea they were supposed to self-isolate at home for two weeks.
Italy has the highest coronavirus death rate in the world. The virus, which is particularly dangerous for old people,
People flying into the UK from Gatwick from Italy said they were allowed to travel as normal – they will now be expected to isolate themselves at home for two weeks in case they have caught the coronavirus
British Airways has cancelled all of its flights to and from Italy because of the coronavirus outbreak there (Pictured, a BA arrivals board at Heathrow Airport)
People have also been surprised to find they are still able to travel as normal, facing no health checks or questioning at the British border, despite the impending threat of a major coronavirus outbreak in the UK.
Italy is now the worst-hit country outside of China – more than 10,000 people there have caught the illness and at least 631 have died. The UK has now recorded more than 450 cases and six patients have died.
At least 382 people in the UK have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and six have died
Experts say the UK – where the number of coronavirus cases started to take off last week – is just two weeks away from being in a situation as bad as Italy’s
IS THE UK HEADING FOR AN ITALIAN-STYLE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS?
The UK could be heading straight for a coronavirus crisis like the one which has crippled Italy, leading experts have warned.
Italy last night put all of its 60million people into lockdown and banned movement between cities in a drastic bid to contain the outbreak, which has infected 9,000 people.
But one scientist tracking the outbreak in the UK said Britain is following the same trajectory and could end up in a similar situation as Italy within two weeks.
The number of cases in Italy has rocketed from just three on February 21 to at least 9,172. While in the UK it has jumped from nine to 321.
Professor Mark Handley, at University College London, compared the rate of coronavirus infection in Italy, which is in crisis, to that in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the US and Switzerland and found they’re growing at the same rate
Denise Owens, who returned from Venice last night after a holiday with her husband, said there had been signs of precautions being taken but they were not followed through.
She told MailOnline: ‘While on the plane we all had to fill out forms so they could trace all passengers if one became ill.
‘I went to hand mine in on the plane but was told we had to hand them in inside the airport, but there was no-one to give these forms to. Nobody was interested. Mine is still in my bag.’
Another family who visited the north of Italy during February half-term said they were told they didn’t need to self-isolate when they came home.
Silvia Monchelato and her family, who have lived in London for 15 years, returned in the same week that Italy’s rampant outbreak started to spiral out of control.
They were told by NHS 111 that they did not need to isolate, she told MailOnline, but she and her son were taken into quarantine when he started to feel ill – but her daughter was sent back to school.
Mrs Monchelato, who is Italian but has had both her children in the UK, had been to Veneto, one of the northern Italian regions at the heart of the country’s outbreak and returned on February 26.
She called an ambulance when her son started to have trouble breathing.
She said: ‘When [paramedics] arrived they told me to get off with my son and my daughter headed off to school.
‘They took us to St Mary’s Hospital and kept us inside the vehicle for about two hours until a team came to test us for the coronavirus.
‘After this, with security, masked medical staff [came and] took us inside the hospital to a cubicle and locked us inside for four days until the negative test result arrived.
‘What if the test had been positive? My daughter who travelled with us went to school all week, free to infect others.
‘The measures that the British government is taking are not at all logical, consistent or protective.’
People in Italy are facing increasingly difficult trips home to the UK after British Airways and Jet2 yesterday announced they were cancelling all flights between the two countries.
Ryanair will continue to fly as normal until Saturday – with customers in Italy able to fly home before it stops all international flights from the virus-hit nation until April 8.
EasyJet has cancelled most of its flights at Milan, Venice and Verona but is still flying between other parts of Italy and the UK. The airline said anyone who has not been contacted can assume their flight is scheduled as normal.
The budget airline also flies to England from airports in Bologna, Turin, Livorno, Ancona, Rome, Naples, Bari, Brindisi, Sicily and Sardinia. These services are not affected by cancellations, according to the firm’s website.
Vuelling is also running some flights.
Italian airline Alitalia has stopped flying out of Milan Malpensa and limited flights from Milan Linate to only domestic routes, but it continues to fly internationally out of Rome.
The UK’s outbreak started in earnest last week when the number of confirmed patients more than doubled from 23 to 51 between Saturday, February 29, and Tuesday, March 3.
Government officials have decided not to move to the second stage of Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s coronavirus action plan, and remain in the first phase which focuses on trying to contain and stop the virus.
The number of coronavirus cases confirmed in the UK has risen to 382 and more than 26,000 people have been tested
They have, however, admitted that they expect a ‘significant’ outbreak to take hold in Britain.
England’s deputy chief medical officer, Dr Jenny Harries, predicted ‘many thousands of people’ would get COVID-19.
Most people only get a mild illness and don’t need medical help, while others may be hospitalised and a small proportion will get pneumonia and die.
Dr Harries told Sky News: ‘We currently have relatively few cases here, which is why we are still in the containment phase [the first step of government action plan].
‘Obviously we will have significant numbers in a way in which the country is not used to.
‘This is the sort of thing that professionally we’re trained for and very rarely see, almost in a professional lifetime.
‘Large numbers of the population will become infected because it’s a naive population, nobody has got antibodies to this virus currently.
‘We will see many thousands of people infected by coronavirus, that’s what we’re seeing in other countries and the important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections.’
Engineer Anna De Luca, 30, who lives in Brighton and arrived at Gatwick yesterday, said: ‘There were no checks at all. So I said, I will take some responsibility and wear the mask – even if it’s useless.
‘But even in Naples they did a check, and told us to stay one metre away from the next person. And then on the plane there was nothing. We weren’t given any information.
‘I just asked a man working here, he said maybe you should phone 111, but there were no checks at all.’
Anna De Luca (left) nor Carmine Loru (right) both flew home to England from Italy yesterday but said they weren’t given any information about the Government’s new rule that anyone returning must self-isolate for two weeks
Carmine Loru, 39, who arrived at Gatwick on a flight from Florence, said that he had been given no information about self-isolation.
Mr Loru, whose family live in Florence, said: ‘There is a lot of paranoia in Italy, but here there is not even anybody checking us.
‘I read on the BBC that I’m supposed to stay at home for 14 days, but nobody said anything about that on the plane. In Florence they didn’t tell us anything about what to do in London.’
Retired greengrocer Martin Rudd claimed the public hand-sanitiser pumps at Stansted Airport were empty and there was no up to date health advice when in the arrivals hall when he arrived from Pisa yesterday.
The 64-year-old said: ‘I’m in a high-risk group – I’m diabetic and I’ve had a triple heart by-pass – so I’m taking precautions.
‘The hand-sanitiser pumps are empty and the only information is on a notice board in the arrivals hall. There isn’t any one checking to see if people are unwell or taking anyone’s temperature.’
Mr Rudd, who had been on holiday in northern part of Italy but outside the original ‘Red Zone’ with his partner Linda Collis, booked an earlier flight after the Italian government announced a nationwide lock-down.
He said: ‘My son called warned us last night that travel restrictions were changing so I booked an earlier flight so we’ve come home this morning. In fact the plane was practically empty. There were on about 15 people on the flight.’
Mr Rudd said he was taking a taxi home and would stay indoors for the required 14 days in accordance with the latest advice from Public Health England.
He said: ‘I’ve got grandchildren so I don’t want to infect them. I’m well prepared. I’ve got lots of food in, everything I need.
‘I bought a load of hand sanitizer before we left, in fact I took six bottles with us to Italy and I’ve been cleaning my hands after touching anything.’