Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio announced that Italy will send a plane to Japan to bring back the 35 Italians aboard the Diamond Princess.

“We decided yesterday to send a flight and bring those 35 Italians home,” Italy’s Di Maio said on Twitter on Sunday.

Twenty-five of those Italians are crew members on the ship, including the cruise ship’s captain.

Italy’s ministries of defense, foreign affairs and health as well as civil protection officials were working out the logistics.

No date for the flight has been announced yet.

Meanwhile, another 99 holidaymakers stuck on the ship tested positive for coronavirus on Monday.

Japan’s health ministry confirmed that 454 passengers had contracted the virus, including 189 carriers who have no symptoms, as of Monday, local time.

The Diamond Princess, owned by Carnival Corp, has been quarantined since arriving in Yokohama on February 3, after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong before it travelled to Japan was diagnosed with the virus.

It had around 3700 passengers and crew on board.

Two chartered planes flew 340 Americans who were aboard the vessel out of Japan late Sunday.

Around 380 Americans had been on the ship.

The Australian government will send Qantas flights on Wednesday to evacuate citizens from the ship .

More than 200 Australians are on board the ship and 26 have tested positive for the virus.

The Diamond Princess cruise has the most confirmed coronavirus infections outside China.

 Authorities have tested 1723 of the passengers.

The viral outbreak that emerged in China in December has infected more than 69,000 people globally, killing 1665 people in mainland China and five others elsewhere.

Chinese authorities have placed some 60 million people under a strict lockdown, built emergency hospitals and instituted tight controls across the country to fight the spread of the virus.

European nations have reported 47 cases of the virus in nine countries, including three in Italy.

France on Saturday announced the first death of a virus patient in Europe and outside of Asia, an 80-year-old Chinese tourist in Paris.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has named the illness COVID-19.