Hotel guests prematurely ended their stays and cancelled upcoming trips upon the news of the first case, one hotelier said on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to media.

“Our hotel is now empty,” the hotelier said. “But we had to help our guests to leave the city when they still had the opportunity yesterday.”

Authorities estimated several thousand people would be stranded by the transport shutdown and asked hotels to shelter them.

“We did not want to rush to the airport to leave the city because of the risk being in a crowded place. So we are now stuck here,” said Lien Nguyen, who was travelling with her family of four for their summer holiday.

“But it is not a bad place to get stranded for two weeks,” she said.

On Monday, the government said it had requested the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) to allow domestic airlines to significantly increase the number of local flights from Da Nang to 11 Vietnamese cities in order to help evacuate 80,000 people, mostly local tourists.

The evacuation was expected to take four days, a government statement said.

Vietnam is throwing every weapon in its arsenal at its effort to contain the new spread in Da Nang. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has ordered tighter border and immigration controls. Police have made a number of arrests of Vietnamese and Chinese charged with shepherding people into the country illegally.

With the new infections, Vietnam has reported 431 coronavirus cases, with no deaths.

Taiwan on Tuesday was investigating its first possible local coronavirus infection in more than a month, a Thai man who tested positive last week, as the island also faces a rise in cases brought from overseas.

Taiwan’s early response was effective in keeping the pandemic at bay, with just 467 infections and seven deaths. Most of the cases have been imported and have recovered.

Until the Thai man’s positive test, the island had not seen a local case of coronavirus infection since June 24.

Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Centre said it was probing where and how the man contracted the virus. The migrant worker arrived on the island in January and tested positive on July 25, shortly after returning to Thailand.

More than 180 people who had contact with him in Taiwan have undergone health screenings, the centre said.

“We will make all necessary checks, clarifying how he got infected and whether there is a possibility for further contagion,” the centre’s deputy chief, Chuang Jen-hsiang, told reporters in Taipei.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday cut short a planned interstate tour to focus on the country’s coronavirus crisis, citing a “very complex” outbreak in aged care homes in the city of Melbourne.

Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, recorded 384 new virus cases on Tuesday, down from the record 532 it reported on Monday, but still at levels alarming health officials.

“The situation in Victoria aged care is very complex, you have a combination of the community transmission which is widespread in Melbourne finding its way into many facilities, and in particular, it has found its way into the aged care workforce,” Morrison said in Yandina, a town in Queensland state.

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The prime minister said he was abandoning the remainder of his Queensland tour to return to the capital of Canberra.

Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said 769 active coronavirus cases have been linked to several aged care centres in Victoria, which reported nine new deaths since Monday.

“I cannot stand here and tell you I have confidence that staff and management across a number of private sector aged care facilities are able to provide the care that is appropriate to keep their residents safe,” Andrews said.

New Zealand on Tuesday said there was no evidence a man who tested positive for Covid-19 in South Korea after travelling from New Zealand via Singapore was infected in the country.

The man had been in New Zealand since March 18 on a visitor’s visa and left the country from Christchurch Airport on a Singapore Airlines flight on July 21, Health Minister Chris Hipkins said.

The man spent 14 hours and 20 minutes in a transit lounge at Singapore’s Changi Airport, along with people who had travelled from other parts of the world, Hipkins said. It is believed he was infected there.

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Amid an “abundance of caution”, officials were contact-tracing two rows in front of and behind the man, Hipkins said.

Officials had not spoken to the man because he was not a New Zealand citizen and so needed to seek permission to do so, said Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the director general of health. Because of this, all possible close contacts could not yet be identified. But 170 had been traced, of which “the vast majority” had been spoken to.

New Zealand on Tuesday reported one new coronavirus case – a woman in her 20s who travelled from Afghanistan via Dubai. It has recorded a total of 1,207 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the pandemic.

Harry Harris, the US ambassador to South Korea, said it was too uncomfortable to keep while wearing a coronavirus mask.

His facial hair had drawn criticism from the media and a small number of online commentators, who compared his moustache to those worn by colonial Japanese governors during the country’s brutal rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

Harris, a retired Navy admiral who became ambassador in July 2018, acknowledged in January that his moustache had become “a point of some fascination here”.

The diplomat shared a video of his trip to the barbershop on Twitter.

“Glad I did this,” Harris tweeted on Saturday after his visit to a barbershop in Seoul. “For me it was either keep the ’stache or lose the mask. Summer in Seoul is way too hot & humid for both. #COVID guidelines matter & I’m a masked man!”

In Japan, a bodyguard of Defence Minister Taro Kono has tested positive for the coronavirus, a Defence Ministry source said on Tuesday.

Kono underwent a test on Tuesday and tested negative for Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.

Kono will be on official duty on Wednesday and thereafter as scheduled, according to the ministry.

The infection of the bodyguard was discovered as Japan struggles with a resurgence of infections, with the Tokyo metropolitan area, as well as other prefectures with huge urban populations such as Osaka and Aichi, reporting a record number of single-day coronavirus cases in July.

Reporting by Reuters, AP