Melissa Qian kept pressing the refresh buttons on two plane ticket sites.
She was desperate for seats for her seven travelling companions and herself on a flight out of Yining, a city in the Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture in China’s far western region of Xinjiang.
Flights had been cancelled, and so had bus and train services. Roads were also blocked.
Qian and her friends were among legions of tourists stranded in the prefecture on Sunday when authorities in Ili put the area in lockdown, after two asymptomatic Covid-19 patients were identified in routine testing in the city of Khorgos, about 100km (62 miles) from Yining.
Khorgos health authorities said the first patient flew to Yining from Chengdu, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, on September 19 and then drove to Khorgos to return to work at a clothing store.
The patient went to a number of shops and supermarkets, as did the patient’s daughter, who also tested positive for the coronavirus.
Wang Shujiang, director of the Khorgos health commission, said on Monday that the two patients were tested for the first time on Sunday.
“They are now quarantined and under medical surveillance in a special hospital in Khorgos,” Wang said.
A Covid-19 task force tracked down 192 close contacts and put them under medical surveillance.
On Sunday, Khorgos authorities tested all 38,376 residents under their jurisdiction and all the results came back negative, Wang said.
By Monday afternoon, Khorgos was already doing a second round of mass testing.
“Khorgos is a port city on the border of China and east Kazakhstan and also a tourist city. Therefore, we need to trace the origin [of the infection] and confirm its source with genome tests,” Wang said.
On Sunday, Xinjiang Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo also ordered officials and cadres to be on the highest alert to ensure that no cases went undetected.
Videos posted online showed hundreds of people forced to spend Sunday night at Yining’s railway station.
Travellers at train stations and airports throughout the prefecture also had to queue for coronavirus tests, according to posts on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform.
Tianjin Airlines said on Monday it would refund tickets for cancelled flights to Yining.
Qian said she travelled to northern Xinjiang with 20 others as part of a tour group and Yining was their final stop.
The nine-day trip ended on Sunday, but she and some others on the tour wanted to stay for another few days of sightseeing. She stayed in Yining on Sunday and planned to fly to Chengdu on Tuesday but that plan was scuppered by the lockdown.
She said she was surprised by the swiftness of the official response.
“I was surprised but mentally prepared for it, as I had heard similar stories before going there,” Qian said.
At 7am on Monday she saw that a direct flight from Chengdu heading to Yining had already departed. She was sure there was a chance to get out and her continued efforts to book a ticket paid off. She eventually secured a seat and flew out of Ili around noon on Monday.
She said it could have been the last flight out of the region, as all others on Monday were cancelled or delayed indefinitely.
A tourist from Beijing wrote on Weibo that hotels in other parts of Xinjiang had told her not to check in because she had visited Ili.
“After a few hours and more than a dozen phone calls, including one to [the emergency number] 110, I realised that no hotel anywhere in Xinjiang will let me stay tonight.”