'Please take my daughter': Mother of girl with cancer pleads at virus blockade

A mother reacts as she pleads with police to allow her daughter to pass a checkpoint for cancer treatment after she arrived from Hubei province at the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province, China, as the country is hit by an outbreak of a new coronavirus, February 1, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

JIUJIANG, China (Reuters) - Hours ticked by on Saturday as 50-year-old Lu Yuejin struggled to get past the police checkpoint on the bridge over the Yangtze river and out of Hubei province, which is on virtual lockdown as China scrambles to control a coronavirus outbreak.

Lu, a farmer from a village on the Hubei province side of the bridge, was trying to gain passage for her daughter, 26-year-old Hu Ping, who has leukaemia. She has been unable to receive a second round of chemotherapy treatment in the overwhelmed hospitals of provincial capital Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus outbreak.