It was touch and go for some New Zealanders in Wuhan trying to get through security checks and get last-minute permits to board the evacuation flight home overnight.
Lily Gao, who RNZ been following as she's made plans to escape the locked-down city, was held up at a checkpoint with her two-year-old daughter for more than three hours, while another Auckland woman decided that running the gauntlet to the airport wasn't worth the risk.
But at around 2am, the government-chartered Air New Zealand flight NZ1942 finally took off from the epicentre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, bound for Auckland.
Matthew Theunissen reports.
