China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) on Monday dispatched a special team to Japan to arrange two chartered flights for the evacuation of over 300 Hong Kong residents on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Zeng Weiguo, head of the HKSAR immigration department, said Tuesday night that what's most important now is to have access to Hong Kong passengers' information, but Japanese officials cannot confirm it. 

According to Japanese authorities, all passengers remained on the ship still have to be tested and those who are tested positive for the virus will not be allowed to leave.

The tests will be completed on Thursday. Zeng said they will do their best to send Hong Kong passengers home by chartered flights on Thursday.

Tokyo Haneda Airport will be the location where the two Hong Kong chartered flights take off. Apart from the more than 300 Hong Kong passengers who will be abroad the planes, five other Macao passengers will also be evacuated by the same flights.  

More than 300 American cruise passengers, including 14 who tested positive, are being quarantined on two separate U.S. military bases after leaving Japan, the Associated Press reports. 

One plane carried passengers to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, while another touched down at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. 

U.S. officials said the cruise passengers who arrived at Travis will stay at a different location from the 200 other Americans already quarantined on the base. 

No Travis personnel will have contact with the passengers, officials said. 

The U.S. State Department said that the 14 passengers who tested positive for the COVID-19 were exposed to other passengers for about 40 minutes before being isolated. 

The U.S. organized the evacuation because people on the Diamond Princess were at high risk of exposure to the new coronavirus, which has infected more 72,500, primarily in China, and killed 1,870 people. The evacuation cut short 14-day quarantine on the cruise ship that began February 3. 

The cruise ship evacuees will be quarantined for another 14 days – for a total of nearly four weeks. 

The quarantine on the Diamond Princess ends Wednesday. The remaining crew members will disembark in Yokohama. As of Tuesday, 542 cases of the virus were identified among the 3,711 passengers. This makes the Diamond Princess the highest concentration of new infections outside China. 

Investigators are trying to determine why.