Xiao Yao doesn’t know when or where he caught the new coronavirus.

He suspects it happened on his train journey home to celebrate the Lunar New Year in Jingzhou city, in central China’s Hubei province.

The 27-year-old, who works in the southwest city of Chengdu, only realized something was amiss as the clock ticked midnight into the year of the rat on January 25.

“I suddenly began to feel that my body was very warm, and I began to panic,” he told AFP.

Xiao, who was at a friend’s house in Jingzhou at the time, wasn’t sure what to do.

He had heard horror stories about the virus spreading through the country from friends at the epicenter of the outbreak in nearby Wuhan.

“The feeling I got was that you shouldn’t go to the hospital — you will fall ill if you aren’t already ill,” he said.

But he knew he had to get away from his friend’s young child and elderly parents, to protect them.

By then, Wuhan and other parts of Hubei had been placed under a quarantine that blocked millions of people from traveling.

Unable to return to his parents’ home in a different township, Xiao checked into a nearby hotel, where his long ordeal began.