According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), a 54-year-old South Korean resident of Wuhan who arrived back home on Monday tested positive for the new strain of the virus that has killed 56 people so far.

“Upon arrival at the airport he showed no symptoms but he started suffering from fever, chills and muscle cramps on Wednesday. His condition seems to have improved for a few days before getting worse again, at which time he contacted health authorities and was placed in isolation on Saturday for tests and treatment,” the KCDC said.

It said more information about the third case will be made available in due course.

Besides the latest confirmed case, the KCDC said it has checked 47 people who have showed symptoms so far, with all testing negative for the illness. The tally was 32 on Saturday.

The country reported two confirmed cases of the new coronavirus strain on Monday and Friday and is keeping close tabs on those that may have come in contact with such people.

To counter the health threat posed by the virus, the health authorities here said Saturday that they have designated mainland China a “coronavirus watch” zone as part of their ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus here.

Later in the day, South Korea’s foreign ministry raised the travel advisory level for Wuhan and the Hubei region to “red alert” and recommended its citizens to evacuate the region.

The “red alert” is the third highest in the country’s four-tier travel warning system.

Reflecting the concerns raised by the coronavirus, airports across South Korea have set up checkpoints to screen passengers from China and other countries for signs of illness, with local authorities accelerating quarantine efforts to contain the virus as people visit relatives at home or travel abroad.

Health workers stressed citizens should follow strict personal hygiene rules whether they are in the country or traveling abroad, especially since large numbers of Chinese tourists are visiting South Korea during the holiday period. The start of the Lunar New Year is celebrated by both Korean and Chinese people.

They said people feeling ill should immediately contact its emergency call center by dialing “1339.”

It also asked people to wash their hands frequently, cover their mouths when coughing and, if they have respiratory problems, wear a mask.

Common symptoms of the coronavirus, thought to have originated in Wuhan, central China, include fever, sore throat and breathing difficulties, with more acute cases bringing chills and muscle pain. Health experts said that elderly people and those with underlying disorders should be more careful.

China announced that besides the deaths, 1,975 people are confirmed infected amid concerns that the virus is spreading quickly and widely. It said that of those infected, 324 were in critical condition.

Outside China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Macao, Hong Kong, France, Australia and the United States have reported confirmed cases of the new coronavirus strain, and there are media reports of a new case in Canada. (Yonhap)

The government in Beijing broadened an extraordinary quarantine to more than 50 million people – roughly equal to the population of Spain – enforcing a travel ban on 16 cities in central Hubei province, where the lethal virus first appeared.

In the United States, health officials confirmed three new cases – one in Arizona and two in California – bringing the total to five. The patients – in Southern California, Chicago, Arizona and Washington state – had traveled from Wuhan, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. All are hospitalized.

As of midafternoon Sunday, the CDC has been investigating 100 people in 26 states, including the five who were confirmed infected. Of those, 25 people have been tested and are not infected with the virus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/57d569c4-b016-4f48-94c1-9c53dde48efe

Health officials expect more American cases, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters. But the virus is not believed to be spreading from person to person in the United States, she said.

“For this reason, we continue to believe that the immediate health risks from the 2019 coronavirus to the general American public is low at this time,” Messonnier said. “But the threat is serious, and our public health response is aggressive, with the aim of helping protect Americans.”

Chinese officials, however, say the worst is yet to come. Health Minister Ma Xiaowei said Sunday that the virus is developing the ability to spread more easily, while the vice minister of industry, Wang Jiangping, said demand for medical supplies is overwhelming China’s ability to produce them.

The mayor of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, said he expects at least 1,000 more infections to surface. Workers are racing to build at least three pop-up 1,000-bed hospitals in the city to cope with the anticipated surge.

China’s national health commission reported that 2,744 people across 30 provinces had been infected as of Sunday. Eighty deaths have been reported, including in major metropolitan areas such as Shanghai. Several doctors in Beijing, the capital, also reported being infected.

Patients also have been confirmed in France, South Korea, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Australia.

After a slow start, Chinese authorities have moved aggressively to combat the novel ailment. Officials indefinitely extended the annual Lunar New Year holiday beyond its scheduled Jan. 30 end and deployed more than 1,000 doctors and military personnel to Wuhan.

The State Department, meanwhile, plans to evacuate diplomats posted at the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan on a charter flight on Tuesday, according to a statement posted on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The consulate is about two miles from the Huanan Seafood Market, where the virus is believed to have first jumped from animals to humans.

A “limited” number of seats on the aircraft will be available for other Americans seeking to flee the city, with priority being given to those most at risk of succumbing to the fatal illness, the statement said.

Chinese authorities have banned the sale of wild animals for the duration of the crisis.

The economic fallout from the epidemic also is likely to be significant. Even before the outbreak, China’s economy was slowing, hampered by the trade war with the United States and government efforts to slow widespread borrowing. The galloping virus, which has crimped travel, shuttered movie theaters and idled factories, will further depress growth.

That will put pressure on Chinese officials to pause their debt-reduction campaign and goose the economy with more spending. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell may address the implications for the global economy at Wednesday’s scheduled meeting of the central bank’s rate-setting committee, said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Grant Thornton in Chicago.

The virus will also imperil China’s ability to meet the targets for additional purchases of U.S. goods contained in the trade deal President Donald Trump signed this month.

That “phase one” accord calls for China over the next two years to buy $200 billion worth of American goods and services beyond previous levels, a goal many analysts regarded as ambitious even before the outbreak of disease.

“All of a sudden phase one looks pretty hard to reach,” said Swonk.

Ma, the health minister, told reporters Sunday that the virus is infectious during its incubation period, meaning that a person could spread it to others before experiencing symptoms. That’s a significant difference from the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus, which began in China in 2002 and spread globally, killing 774 people.

The Chinese announcement about the new coronavirus’s transmissibility could explain the soaring rate of infection in China, which registered a 50% jump in cases on Sunday. Local authorities expect a similar leap on Monday.

But the CDC does not have “any clear evidence of patients being infectious before symptom onset,” Messonnier said during the Sunday news conference, adding that health officials are “actively investigating” that possibility.

Scientists say the virus is adapting to humans much faster than SARS. It took the SARS virus three months to mutate into a form that spread easily among humans, but the related Wuhan coronavirus took one month, George Fu, a top Chinese epidemiologist, told reporters.

“Why is it transmitting so fast?” he said. “The two species are like the cartoon Tom and Jerry: Viruses are continually adapting to humans, but human also adapt, and the virus’s ability to make people ill also goes down.”

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said he was en route to Beijing for meetings with Chinese government officials. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, named to the post in 2017, said on Twitter that the agency was “working 24/7 to support” Chinese efforts to battle the disease.

The Wuhan coronavirus has caused mild to severe respiratory illness, fever, coughing and shortness of breath. The CDC believes symptoms can manifest two to 14 days after exposure. No drugs or vaccines have been recommended specifically to treat the virus.

At the heart of the outbreak, in central China’s Hubei province, a travel ban extended to a total of 16 cities and covered about 51 million people. Video distributed by state media showed local officials in adjacent regions taking extreme measures, including using excavators to destroy and block roads, to discourage residents from traveling to infected areas of Hubei to visit stranded relatives inside the quarantine zone.

China’s Center for Disease Control on Sunday found large amounts of the coronavirus from samples taken from Wuhan’s South China seafood market, where wild animals, including deer and bats, were being sold.

“It is highly suspected that the epidemic is related to wildlife trade,” state broadcaster CCTV reported. Researchers say the related SARS coronavirus in 2002 probably originated in bats and spread to humans through civet cat, which was sold in wildlife markets and eaten as a delicacy in southern China.

The spread of the virus – and travel bans extending to several major hubs in China – threatened to paralyze the country for an indefinite period. Officials in Beijing said Sunday that they “have not and will not close the city because of the epidemic” in response to online rumors suggesting an imminent lockdown of the capital, which has a population of 22 million, with a significant fraction traveling this week to visit family.

Two teams of British epidemiologists released studies over the weekend estimating that each infected person was spreading the disease to two or three people. A team from Lancaster University projected that infections in Wuhan could explode to 190,000 cases by as early as next week.

The Chinese central government said it is mustering manufacturers to send 100,000 hazardous-materials suits and millions of face masks to Wuhan, where hospitals reported overfilled beds and doctors collapsing from exhaustion. Videos on social media from Wuhan hospitals showed patient queues stretching around the block and nurses worrying the true number of cases – based on what they were witnessing – far exceeded what was being officially reported.

Wang, the vice minister of industry, said Sunday that the country was facing a significant shortage of medical supplies, including protective suits for medical workers. Hubei province alone required 100,000 suits a day, he said, but Chinese manufacturers could only produce 30,000 a day.

Michael Einhorn, president of Dealmed, an independent medical supply distributor in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, said prices of masks jumped as soon as news of the virus spread, while sales volumes tripled through retailers such as Amazon.

Dealmed typically carries at least 90 days’ supply but currently has only about two weeks’ worth left.

If demand continues, the availability of masks will be “very limited” within 10 days, Einhorn said in a statement, and if the virus continues to spread, there will be “extreme shortages” in as early as three weeks’ time.

Meanwhile, Chinese citizens stranded inside the vast quarantine zone, locked down by paramilitary police checkpoints for the fourth day, took to social media to describe a sense of surreal desperation during a week when families should be celebrating the new year with dumplings, fireworks and presents.

One Wuhan resident described sharing the dwindling groceries she had purchased to last for three days with an elderly couple whose food supplies were exhausted.

“I don’t know how to solve this food problem,” wrote the user, Guapidawushi. “Right now I really, really don’t know what to do. I’m completely helpless.”

Some users shared videos of once-buzzing streets in Wuhan’s historic, European-style riverside district lying empty. Others posted more lighthearted pictures of women playing Mah-jongg with masks and transparent grocery bags over their heads.

The situation appeared to be more dire in the vast Hubei countryside.

The Chinese magazine Caijing reported that some smaller village clinics were rationed six masks, and large hospitals were within one or two days of running out of supplies. In Jingzhou city, a short distance up the Yangtze River from Wuhan, doctors told reporters that they were wearing rain ponchos because they lacked protective suits.

In Hong Kong, where a sixth case of the virus was confirmed Sunday, pressure is mounting on the government to tighten border controls with China. One hospital workers’ union threatened a five-day strike if more measures weren’t taken.

Protesters in the evening attacked a building that has been set aside for quarantine and set its lobby alight with molotov cocktails, police reported.

“We are all nervous here and everyone has begun curtailing their social lives,” said Andrew Collier, managing director at Orient Capital Research. “I was planning a trip to China but will delay that until there is more information.”

– – –

Denyer reported from Tokyo. Lynch and Shammas reported from Washington. Min Joo Kim in Seoul, Shibani Mahtani in Hong Kong, Lyric Li in Beijing, Paul Schemm in Dubai contributed to this report.

Kobe Bryant, a five-time National Basketball Association champion and global sports icon who retired in 2016 before adding an Academy Award to his considerable trophy case two years later, died Sunday in a helicopter crash northwest of Los Angeles. He was 41.

The aircraft, which also carried Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others, crashed and burst into flames near Calabasas, California, late Sunday morning. There were no survivors. Bryant, whose home and post-NBA film and publishing offices were in the Orange County suburbs of southern Los Angeles, traveled frequently via helicopter.

Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, and three other daughters were not aboard the aircraft, which was reportedly on the way to a youth basketball tournament in which Gianna, known as Gigi, would be playing.

The incident sent shock waves throughout the sports and pop culture worlds, and several NBA teams took 24- and eight-second violations during Sunday’s games to commemorate Bryant’s jersey numbers with the Los Angeles Lakers.

“Words can’t describe the pain I’m feeling,” former NBA superstar Michael Jordan said in a statement Sunday afternoon. “I loved Kobe – he was like a little brother to me. We used to talk often, and I will miss those conversations very much. He was a fierce competitor, one of the greats of the game and a creative force.”

“Kobe was a legend on the court and just getting started in what would have been just as meaningful a second act,” said former president Barack Obama, who along with former first lady Michelle Obama, Bryant referred to as friends in 2018. “To lose Gianna is even more heartbreaking to us as parents.”

In sports and in life, Bryant was an individual whose tirelessness and competitive drive were as notable as his versatility and ambition.

Known late in his career by the nickname “Black Mamba,” Bryant was one of the smoothest and most dangerous shooters in a league previously dominated by Jordan, Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird. When those players retired or their talents faded, Bryant took up their mantle. The 6-f00t-6 shooting guard was named to the NBA’s all-star team in 18 of his 20 seasons, all with the Lakers, and he twice led the league in scoring. He scored 81 points during a game in 2006, the second-highest total in a game in league history.

He and Shaquille O’Neal led the Lakers to three consecutive championships, from 2000 to 2002, though perhaps more impressive was Bryant’s ability to push the Lakers back into the league’s championship ranks after the departures of O’Neal and Coach Phil Jackson, who had guided Jordan’s Chicago Bulls to six championships during the 1990s.

Bryant, who was one of the first players to skip college basketball and declare himself eligible for the NBA draft in 1996, modeled his game after Jordan and saw himself as the heir apparent – and occasional rival – to the former Bulls superstar.

“I was thinking in my mind: I didn’t care,” Bryant said in 2017 during a podcast hosted by Geno Auriemma, the 11-time national championship coach of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. “I’m going to destroy this guy. I don’t care if I’m 18; I’m coming for blood.”

Indeed, Bryant’s voracious competitiveness could strike some as aloofness, and his reputation as a teammate and sports role model were matters of controversy. He famously clashed with O’Neal, orchestrating the fun-loving center’s trade from Los Angeles in 2004 because Bryant occasionally viewed him as lazy.

Bryant’s image had already changed a year earlier, when an employee of a Colorado resort accused him of sexually assaulting her. Although charges were eventually dropped, a civil settlement was reached, and Bryant’s image as a clean-cut cultural darling was tarnished.

He would spend the next decade rebuilding his image not just as a detail-oriented perfectionist but as a person obsessed with greatness and achievement overall. He became a mentor of famous young NBA players and anonymous youngsters interested in basketball’s finer points. He coached Gianna’s teams and would occasionally lose himself in extolling her prowess on the court, where she showed instincts and devotion that reminded him of himself.

Gianna will “be standing next to me,” Bryant said during a 2018 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “and it’ll be like: ‘And you gotta have a boy. You and [Vanessa] gotta have a boy; have somebody carry on the tradition, the legacy.’ She’s like, ‘I got this.’ ”

There was no doubt Bryant seemed fascinated with the concept of greatness and mastering basketball’s finer points. He attended Women’s National Basketball Association games and frequently commented on the highly successful women’s college teams at Connecticut and Notre Dame. In one of his final public appearances, Bryant and Gianna were courtside at a Lakers game in December, with Bryant appearing to intensely break down a play to his daughter.

If his commitment to fulfilling potential sometimes rubbed peers the wrong way, it also could be infectious. After the U.S. men’s basketball team’s disappointing bronze-medal performance in the 2004 Athens Olympics, Bryant was added to the team and quickly became a veteran leader. A noted early riser who, even as he passed his 40th birthday, would often be up by 5 a.m. for an intense workout or shooting session, he challenged Olympic teammates to join the “Breakfast Club.” Bryant’s group met each morning at 7 for weight training or basketball drills, and alongside fellow team leader and NBA superstar LeBron James, Team USA returned to its past dominance with gold medals in 2008 and 2012.

On Saturday, James passed Bryant on the NBA’s career scoring list, and Bryant’s final post to his 15 million Twitter followers was a congratulations to the 35-year-old James, who has spent the past two seasons with the Lakers.

“Continuing to move the game forward @KingJames. Much respect my brother,” Mr. Bryant’s tweet read, with a hashtag of James’s points total when he passed Bryant: 33,644.

Between games and workouts, Bryant was an insatiable learner on and off the court. Early in his career, he picked the brains of Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon to learn and mimic their signature basketball moves. Although Bryant had never attended college, he was nonetheless captivated by the pursuit of knowledge and lifelong improvement. He took summer school courses at UCLA after his rookie season in the NBA, and years later he invited entertainers and visionaries – Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin among them – for in-depth discussions about their crafts.

“It can seem a little obtuse, maybe, but he seemed to be interested in all of this,” John Williams, the legendary film-score composer and five-time Oscar winner, said of Bryant in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post.

Although Bryant accomplished almost everything possible on the basketball court, a traditional retirement never held much appeal. A lifelong film buff who filled idle time by quoting “Star Wars,” “The Big Lebowski” or a Harry Potter movie, Bryant began imagining his next career before stepping away from his first. His basketball career had made him a millionaire a few hundred times over, but his investments in the sports drink company BodyArmor and other companies that included grooming products and artificial intelligence were positioning Bryant to again follow Jordan, this time into an exclusive club of billionaires who began their careers as athletes.

Unlike Jordan, Bryant had no intention of spending his decades after basketball earning passive income. It was during a ride aboard “The Mamba Chopper,” or what he called the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter he took to Lakers games, that in 2016 he conceived of an alternate world in which his stories and characters would exist. He would call that world “Granity” and would name his fledgling film studio the same.

“There are infinite possibilities,” he told The Post in September 2018, and it was precisely that concept that drew him in.

During Bryant’s final season with the Lakers, he wrote a poem called “Dear Basketball,” or what amounted to a farewell to the game that made him a household name. He later adapted the poem into a nearly four-minute animated film, complete with a rousing score by Williams. It was one of five nominees for best animated short before the 2018 Academy Awards, and Bryant took to the stage in his victory and, in one of the four languages Bryant claimed fluency in, thanked Vanessa and his three daughters. (His fourth, Capri, was born in 2019.)

“You are my inspiration,” he said first in Italian and then English before walking away with his Oscar statuette.

Kobe Bean Bryant was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 23, 1978, before spending many of his formative years in Italy. His mother, the former Pamela Cox, was a homemaker and the sister of former NBA player Chubby Cox; his father, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, was a professional basketball player who spent most of his playing and coaching career in Europe. Both parents survived him, in addition to his wife of 18 years; three daughters, Bianka, Natalia and Capri; and two sisters.

Bryant first attracted national attention as a high school player at Lower Merion High in suburban Philadelphia, and he combined generational talent with looks and flair – his date to senior prom was R&B singer Brandy – perfectly suited for Hollywood.

Although his first name, at least according to Bryant mythology, was inspired by a visit to a high-end steak house, Yahoo Sports reported in 2016 that more than 14,000 boys had been named Kobe during Bryant’s NBA career.

As a 17-year-old, he was the No. 13 pick in the 1996 NBA draft by the Charlotte Hornets, but he threatened to follow in his father’s footsteps and begin his career in Italy if the Hornets retained his rights. The team traded him to the Lakers, with whom he would spend his entire career and become an immediate fan favorite by winning the 1997 slam dunk contest, beginning a sensational career and fulfilling Bryant’s ambition for suiting up for an NBA team most famous for glitz, glamour and an era of glory known as “Showtime.”

The journey had begun on his family’s driveway in Philadelphia, where on snowy days Bryant’s mother would ask him to clear the driveway. He would do so just enough to shoot hoops, sometimes putting up hundreds of shots per day as he perfected a form that would become internationally famous.

“As a six-year-old boy deeply in love with you,” Mr. Bryant would write nearly two decades later in his poem “Dear Basketball,” “I never saw the end of the tunnel. I only saw myself running out of one.”

The United States, meanwhile, announced a third case of the coronavirus – a Chinese traveler from Wuhan who took ill in Orange County, California. Authorities say he is under care in isolation and the “risk of local transmission is low.”

China’s national health commission said early Sunday that the number of confirmed infections had soared 50 percent over the prior 24 hours to 1,975 people across 30 provinces. Fifty-six deaths have been reported, including in major metropolitan areas such as Shanghai. Several doctors in Beijing, the capital, also reported being infected.

“Transmissibility is increasing,” Chinese Health Minister Ma Xiaowei told reporters Sunday. “The outbreak has come to a severe and complicated situation.”

He added that there could “still be new developments” as the virus mutates. “We still don’t know the risks of transformation,” he said.

Scientists have already noticed that the virus is adapting to humans much faster than its predecessor, the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, which killed more than 750 people in 2002-2003.

It took SARS three months to mutate into a form that spread easily between humans, but the related Wuhan coronavirus took only one month, George Fu, a top Chinese epidemiologist told reporters.

“Why is it transmitting so fast?” he said. “The two species are like the cartoon Tom and Jerry: viruses are continually adapting to humans, but human also adapt, and the virus’ ability to make people ill also goes down.”

A government group led by Premier Li Keqiang handling the epidemic response on Sunday proposed a “reasonable extension” of the New Year holiday in order to weather a “vital phase in epidemic prevention and control.” Cities are already rolling out such measures: Beijing’s education officials said schools will resume classes in mid-February, while the manufacturing hub of Suzhou prohibited large businesses from reopening earlier than Feb. 8.

At the heart of the outbreak, in central China’s Hubei Province, a travel ban extended to a total of 16 cities and covered approximately 51 million people. Video distributed by state media showed local officials in adjacent regions taking extreme measures, including using excavators to destroy and block roads, to discourage residents from traveling to infected areas of Hubei to visit stranded relatives – as per Chinese tradition – inside the quarantine zone.

Authorities have also announced the banning of the sale of wild animals after evidence emerged that the disease was transmitted to humans through a market in the city of Wuhan that traded in game meat.

The spread of the virus – and travel bans extending to several major hubs around China – threatened to paralyze the country for an indefinite period, with uncertain implications around the world. Officials in Beijing said Sunday they “have not and will not close the city because of the epidemic” in response to online rumors suggesting an imminent lockdown of the capital, which has a population of 22 million, with a significant fraction traveling this week to visit family.

On Saturday – China’s New Year’s Day – numerous Chinese government agencies said they had summoned workers back to their posts as President Xi Jinping warned of a “grave” situation as the virus “accelerated its spread.”

Two teams of British epidemiologists released studies over the weekend estimating that each infected person was spreading the disease to two or three other people. A team from Lancaster University projected that infections in Wuhan could explode to 190,000 cases by as early as next week.

The Chinese central government said it is mustering manufacturers to send 100,000 hazardous materials suits and millions of face masks to Wuhan, where hospitals reported overfilled beds and doctors collapsing from exhaustion. Videos on social media from Wuhan hospitals showed patient queues stretching around the block and nurses surmising that the true number of cases – based on what they were witnessing – far exceeded what was being officially reported.

The vice minister of industry, Wang Jiangping, said Sunday the country was facing a significant shortage of medical supplies including protective suits for medical workers. Hubei Province alone required 100,000 suits a day but Chinese manufacturers could only produce 30,000 a day, he said. “There’s a prominent gap in supply and demand,” he said, adding that China was hoping to purchase supplies on the international market.

Masks in particular have been in short supply, with shortages now being reported abroad as well. In Japan, Chinese tourists have been emptying the shelves of face masks, according to local news reports, while supplies are also running out globally.

Michael Einhorn, president of Dealmed, an independent medical supply distributor in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, said prices of masks jumped as soon as news of the virus spread, while sales volumes tripled through retailers such as Amazon.

Dealmed typically carries at least 90-days’ supply, and but said the company currently only has about two weeks’ worth left.

If demand continues, the availability of masks will be “very limited” within the next 10 days, and of the virus continues to spread there will be “extreme shortages” as early as three weeks’ time, Einhorn said in a statement.

Authorities in Wuhan and another hard-hit Hubei city, Huanggang, have announced the construction of three pop-up hospitals with thousands of beds to be built within the next few days. Ma, the health minister, said 5,000 new beds should be available by midweek while hundreds of medical professionals are preparing to deploy to the region.

Days after ordering the departure of all non-emergency U.S. personnel, the U.S. Embassy said Sunday it would charter a single flight on Jan. 26 out of Wuhan for remaining consulate staff and American citizens.

Japan has also said it is readying flights to bring home more than 700 Japanese stranded in Wuhan.

Meanwhile, Chinese citizens stranded inside the vast quarantine zone, locked down by paramilitary police checkpoints for the fourth day, took to social media to describe a sense of surreal desperation during a week when families should otherwise be celebrating the new year with dumplings, fireworks and presents.

One Wuhan resident described sharing her dwindling groceries that she had purchased to last for three days with an elderly couple whose food supplies were down to nothing. She said she worried about her food lasting one more day and the population of stray animals abandoned throughout the city.

“I don’t know how to solve this food problem,” wrote the user “Guapidawushi. “Right now I really, really don’t know what to do. I’m completely helpless.”

Some users shared videos of once-buzzing streets in Wuhan’s historic, European-style riverside district lying empty. Others posted more lighthearted pictures of women playing Mah-jongg with masks and transparent grocery bags over their heads.

The situation appeared to be more dire in the vast Hubei countryside outside of Wuhan, where rural authorities were struggling to cope.

The Chinese magazine Caijing reported that some smaller village clinics were only rationed six masks, and large hospitals were within one or two days of running out of supplies. In Jingzhou city, a short distance up the Yangtze River from Wuhan, doctors told reporters they were wearing rain ponchos because they lacked protective suits.

Deng Anqing, a Beijing-based writer who was visiting family in rural Hubei for the New Year holiday, said the hidden crisis was in the countryside.

“The media is focused on Wuhan but we know absolutely nothing about the current situation in the countryside,” Deng wrote in a post. “Large numbers of workers are returning here from Wuhan, but the capabilities of village hospitals are awful. Villages don’t have masks, and it’s hard to convince the elderly to wear them.”

Infections have been confirmed in France, Australia and the United States, but countries in Asia have been especially concerned as millions of Chinese people fan out across the region for the Lunar New Year.

An online petition asking South Korean President Moon Jae-in to ban Chinese nationals from entering the country has drawn more than 280,000 signatures over four days. South Korea confirmed a third case of coronavirus infection on Sunday, a 54-year old man who returned from Wuhan.

North Korea’s official party daily Rodong Sinmun posted prevention advice on Sunday and called for stronger border controls in a piece headlined “We should thoroughly contain the new coronavirus.” Earlier this week, North Korea banned all foreign tourists, most of whom come from its biggest neighbor and ally China. Flights between Beijing and Pyongyang have also been canceled, the Russian Embassy in North Korea said in a statement on Friday.

Japan confirmed it’s fourth case of the virus, a middle aged man from Wuhan who arrived on Wednesday for vacation.

In Hong Kong, where a sixth case of the virus was confirmed Sunday, pressure is mounting on the government to tighten border controls with China over fear of contagion. One hospital workers’ union threatened a five-day strike if more measures weren’t taken.

Protesters in the evening attacked a building that has been set aside for quarantine and set its lobby alight with molotov cocktails, police reported.

In a two-hour presentation that reserved their most provocative attacks for Monday, members of Trump’s legal team echoed the president’s justifications for his actions toward Ukraine and sought to plant doubts about both the prosecutors’ case and its lead advocate, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Yet in arguing that the case for Trump’s removal was partisan and misleading, lawyers for the president omitted facts, presented claims that lacked context or downplayed evidence gathered by House investigators. Their most sweeping arguments did not specifically defend Trump, but instead framed impeachment as no more than a politically motivated effort to remove him from the ballot in November.

“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” said White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who said Trump did “absolutely nothing wrong.”

“We can’t allow that to happen. It would violate our constitution. It would violate our history. It would violate our obligations to the future,” Cipollone told the Senate. “And most importantly, it would violate the sacred trust that the American people have placed in you.”

After three days of arguments in favor of Trump’s removal from House Democrats, most Senate Republicans rallied behind the president’s defense, predicting acquittal. But a small group of closely watched Republicans largely reserved judgment or declined to comment, leaving open the question of whether the trial will include witnesses. Democrats need four Republicans to join them to secure further testimony or evidence.

Trump faces the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history amid accusations that he withheld military aid and an Oval Office meeting to pressure Ukraine’s leaders into announcing investigations of his political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden, now a presidential candidate. Trump was impeached by the House in December on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to these allegations and his directive that his administration not cooperate with the House’s investigation.

His team’s opening argument came on a day when more evidence emerged outside the Senate: A video was released showing Trump ordering the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, at a 2018 donor dinner. His order came minutes after Ukrainian American business executive Lev Parnas criticized her as an impediment.

Yovanovitch was removed more than a year later. Parnas is now under indictment on campaign-finance charges, and the video was released by Parnas’ attorney.

At the end of a marathon week of presentations before the Senate, Trump’s lawyers began speaking at 10 a.m. and ended by noon, allowing senators to return home for a short period before the trial resumes at 1 p.m. on Monday. The next session is expected to include full-throated attacks on Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father was in office and has become a target for criticism by Republicans. The intent is to argue that Trump was justified in seeking investigations into the Bidens despite the Ukrainian government never accusing them of any wrongdoing.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., chastised both the House managers and the president’s defense team for using overheated rhetoric as they debated ground rules for the trial. But when Trump’s lawyers took the podium on Saturday to begin rebutting the managers’ case, their tone was largely subdued.

“We are going to be very respectful of your time,” Cipollones said in his opening remarks. “You heard the House managers speak for nearly 24 hours over three days. We don’t anticipate using that much time.”

The lawyers painted Trump as having sincere concerns about corruption in Ukraine, despite evidence to the contrary, and suggested he was justified in doubting the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

In taking this approach, the lawyers landed repeatedly on themes that matter to Trump, including what he has described as his “perfect” July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, special counsel Robert Mueller III’s report and omissions and errors by the FBI in documents submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the election.

Because of that case, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow argued, the president had reason not to “blindly trust some of the advice he was being given” by intelligence officials.

Taken together, the lawyers’ remarks laid the foundation for a defense of Trump’s unconventional foreign policy toward Ukraine, led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; and an attempt to shore up Trump’s claim that by seeking investigations of the Bidens, he was working to fight corruption, not undermine a political opponent who he might face in November.

Focusing on the July 25 call, deputy White House counsel Michael Purpura suggested that witnesses who expressed concerns about it were politically motivated and said Trump’s conversation with Zelensky reflected the administration’s “legitimate concerns about corruption” in Ukraine.

A rough transcript released by the White House shows the president did not mention “corruption” or a general concern about the issue – only a theory about Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election that has been discredited and his request that Kyiv scrutinize the Bidens.

Purpura also spent considerable time claiming that Ukraine did not learn about the hold on military aid until late August.

“There can’t be a threat without the person knowing he’s being threatened,” he said.

While two Trump administration officials – Pentagon official Laura Cooper and State Department official Catherine Croft – testified that they believed that Ukrainians knew about the hold before that time, Purpura argued that others’ testimony was more credible.

The second part of the defense’s presentation sought to raise doubts about the legal and constitutional validity of the impeachment inquiry. Deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin also mentioned the anonymous whistleblower, whose report helped launch the impeachment probe, and the House’s decision not to investigate them.

“Motivations, bias, reasons for wanting to bring this complaint could be relevant,” Philbin said. “But there wasn’t any inquiry into that.”

The details of the whistleblower’s memo were confirmed by the rough transcript of the July 25 call released by the White House and by the evidence gathered during the House investigation.

In several moments, Trump’s lawyers attacked Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has helped to lead the impeachment inquiry.

Philbin noted that Schiff had once mischaracterized his staff’s dealings with the whistleblower. Purpura also showed a video clip of Schiff parodying dialogue from the July 25 call during a House hearing, a dramatic embellishment that Trump and his allies say obliterates Schiff’s credibility.

“We can shrug it off and say we were making light or a joke. But that was in a hearing in the United States House of Representatives discussing the removal of the president of the United States from office,” Purpura said. “There are very few things, if any, that can be as grave and as serious.”

Senators already allied with Trump declared the presentation a slam-dunk.

“In two hours, the White House counsel entirely shredded the case by the House managers,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told reporters, echoing several other Republicans who used a form of the word shred to characterize the effect of the lawyers’ arguments.

But moderate Republican senators – whose votes will determine whether additional evidence is sought in the trial – did not share detailed opinions on the presentation or the possible need for witnesses.

“I think it’s very likely I’ll be in favor of witnesses, but I haven’t made a decision finally yet and I won’t until both side’s opening arguments are done,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“I thought for the most part, the House managers were effective, and I thought the president’s attorneys this morning were very effective,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told CBS News.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, declined to comment when approached by The Washington Post.

A handful of moderate Democratic senators – who could prove pivotal if they choose to side with Republicans – declared witnesses necessary to the process.

“I thought they did a good job in presenting the defense for the president,” Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., said. “[But] the most important thing I took away from today was they made very clear that there’s not one witness that we’ve heard from . . . that had direct contact with the president.”

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., said he was “stunned” that Trump’s lawyers argued at one point that cross examination is essential to due process, even as the White House bars witnesses from testifying on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

“They American people deserve the truth. They deserve the whole truth,” Jones said. “We’re not getting it.”

The House managers were not permitted to speak during Saturday’s session – though they drew some attention around 9:50 a.m. as part of a procession transferring their 28,578-page trial record across the Capitol to the Senate.

“They don’t contest the basic architecture of the scheme,” Schiff said at a news conference after the presentation by Trump’s lawyers. “They do not contest that the president solicited a foreign nation to interfere in our election, to help him cheat. I think they acknowledged by not even contesting this that the facts are overwhelming.”

In his closing, Cipollone shifted the charges facing the president onto Democrats – a strategy often employed by Trump himself.

“It would be a completely irresponsible abuse of power to do what they’re asking you do – to stop an election, to interfere in an election, and to remove the president of the United States from the ballot,” he said. “Let the people decide for themselves.”