Mr. Chair, we began with reporting through our emergency watch and response centre, which is actually an emergency management tool that conducts a bit of a watch on what's happening globally around the world. We have situation reporting to inform people of developing situations.
In the case of the coronavirus, we began in January to track the spread of that virus. On January 26, we stood up an emergency response team when we saw the measures being taken by the Government of China to control the spread of that virus and the challenges that it was putting in place for local residents in Hubei province in particular.
I would say that, at the time, the full extent of the Canadian presence in Hubei province was not immediately evident. We don't have a consulate in that province. At the time there was only a very small number of Canadians who were actually registered through the registry of Canadians abroad as being resident in Hubei.
I would say, generally, that when Canadians feel in a more secure or safe place they tend not to think about registering with the government when they travel. They do so, I think, in what they perceive as more dangerous or hostile areas. In this case, I think we had only about 38 Canadians registered. Now we know that there are many more—we're up to 565 Canadians registered in Hubei province. About eight or nine days ago we had no requests for consular assistance. Those requests have obviously escalated.
Currently, all the requests we have in Hubei are from Canadians seeking assistance to depart. We have no cases of Canadians who are ill with the virus who are looking for our help to leave the province. We've been working with the Government of China to obtain those permissions.
Obviously, a response and evacuation out of a quarantine zone in a country such as China poses some unique challenges. Every emergency response is different, and this one indeed has a lot of complexity to it. We immediately put in place a process to put together the evacuation flight and seek the necessary permissions. We required visas from the Chinese government, and we required overflight clearances from a number of countries, some of which have closed their airspace in recent days. All of those challenges have been met and overcome, and we are now not that far away from removing the first tranche of Canadians from that situation.
But it does require a very detailed response. We had to send a ground team into Wuhan, so we now have a consular team on the ground in Wuhan city. They are preparing the logistics for the departure. We've been working with local authorities, completing the manifests of passengers and also compiling all the details that are required for ground movements in an area under such severe quarantine restrictions. People have to inform us of their routings, about how they're going to get to the airport—