By TRAVIS LOLLER and KIMBERLEE KRUESI

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tornadoes ripped across Tennessee as people slept early Tuesday, shredding at least 140 buildings and killing at least 22 people. Authorities described painstaking efforts to find survivors in piles of rubble and wrecked basements as the death toll climbed.

One twister caused severe damage across a 10-mile (16 kilometer) stretch of downtown Nashville, wrecking businesses and homes and destroying the tower and stained glass of a historic church. Another erased homes from their foundations along a two-mile (3.2-kilometer) path in Putnam County.

Daybreak revealed a landscape littered with blown-down walls and roofs, snapped power lines and huge broken trees, leaving city streets in gridlock. Schools, courts, transit lines, an airport and the state Capitol were closed. More than a dozen polling stations were damaged, forcing Super Tuesday voters to wait in long lines at alternative sites.

The death toll jumped to 22 Tuesday as first responders gingerly pulled apart the wreckage, hoping to find people alive in the rubble of their homes. Putnam Sheriff Eddie Farris said only 30 percent of the disaster area had a “hard check” by mid-day. “A lot of these homes had basements and we’re hopeful there are still people down in there,” he said.

Nashville residents walked around in dismay as emergency crews closed off roads. Roofs had been torn off apartment buildings, large trees uprooted and debris littered many sidewalks. Walls were peeled away, exposing living rooms and kitchens in damaged homes. Mangled power lines and broken trees came to rest on cars, streets and piles of rubble.

“It is heartbreaking. We have had loss of life all across the state,” said Gov. Bill Lee. He ordered nonessential state workers to stay home just before he was set to fly in a helicopter to survey damage.

President Donald Trump announced plans to visit the disaster area on Friday. “We send our love and our prayers of the nation to every family that was affected,” he said. “We will get there, and we will recover, and we will rebuild, and we will help them.”

The tornadoes were spawned by a line of severe storms that stretched from Alabama into western Pennsylvania.

In Nashville, the twister’s path was mostly north and east of the heart of downtown, sparing many of its biggest tourism draws — the honky tonks of Broadway, the Grand Ole Opry House, the storied Ryman Auditorium, and the convention center.

Instead the storm tore through areas transformed by a recent building boom. Germantown and East Nashville are two of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods, with restaurants, music venues, high-end apartment complexes and rising home prices threatening to drive out longtime residents.

“The dogs started barking before the sirens went off, they knew what was coming,” said Paula Wade, of East Nashville. “Then we heard the roar … Something made me just sit straight up in bed, and something came through the window right above my head. If I hadn’t moved, I would’ve gotten a face full of glass.”

Then she looked across the street and saw the damage at East End United Methodist Church.

“It’s this beautiful Richardsonian Romanesque church; the bell tower is gone, the triptych window of Jesus the Good Shepherd that they just restored and put back up a few weeks ago is gone,” she said.

Wade immediately recalled how a tornado damaged her own St. Ann’s Episcopal church down the street in 1998.

“I had no idea that I still had some PTSD from that other experience so long ago, but the sound of the sirens, that low sound, there’s just nothing like it,” she said. “To look out and see the church, its just heartbreaking. It brings out everything that happened to St. Ann’s.”

The roof came crashing down on Ronald Baldwin and Harry Nahay in bedroom of the one-story brick home they share in East Nashville. “We couldn’t get out,” said Baldwin. “And so I just kept kicking and kicking until we finally made a hole.”

Also in East Nashville, the roaring wind woke Evan and Carlie Peters, but they had no time to reach the relative safety of an interior bathroom. “Within about 10 seconds, the house started shaking,” Carlie Peters said. “I jumped on top of the ground; he jumped on top of me. The ceiling landed on top of him. … we’re grateful to be alive.”

Metro Nashville police said crews were responding to about 40 building collapses in their area. Putnam authorities said an aerial tour revealed more than 100 structures destroyed or damaged.

With more than a dozen Super Tuesday locations in Nashville’s Davidson County damaged, voters were sent to other locations, some of them with long lines. Tennessee’s Secretary of State delayed opening polls in the disaster area for an hour, but said they would close as scheduled Tuesday night.

“Anyone that wants to vote, we want to create an opportunity for you,” Davidson County elections administrator Jeff Roberts said. Because poll workers will be navigating through a damaged city to deliver results Tuesday night, he said the tallying may take longer than anticipated.

A reported gas leak forced an evacuation of the IMT building in Germantown, according to WSMV-TV. Dozens of people, suddenly homeless, were seen carrying their belongings through garbage-strewn streets after the tornado blew through.

Schools were closed in Nashville and beyond. Nashville Electric tweeted that four of its substations were damaged in the tornado. More than 44,000 customers lost power early Tuesday, the utility company said.

The tornado blew down a major Tennesee Valley Authority transmission line in Putnam County, and also damaged gas lines, water mains and cell phone towers, making the recovery much more difficult, authorities said.

Hundreds of people went to a Red Cross shelter for displaced residents at the Nashville Farmers Market, just north of the state capitol, but a power outage there forced them to move again to the Centennial Sportsplex.

The storm system left just scattered rain in its wake as it moved eastward. Strong cells capable of causing damage were spotted in central Alabama, eastern Tennessee and the western Carolinas.

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AP contributors include Jonathan Mattise and Mark Humphrey in Nashville; Adrian Sainz in Memphis; Rebecca Reynolds Yonker in Louisville, Kentucky; and Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON and GILLIAN FLACCUS

SEATTLE (AP) — Health officials in Washington state said Sunday night that a second person had died from the coronavirus — a man in his 70s from a nursing facility near Seattle where dozens of people were sick and had been tested for the virus.

Researchers said earlier the virus may have been circulating for weeks undetected in Washington state.

In a statement, Public Health—Seattle & King County said the man died Saturday. On Friday, health officials said a man in his 50s died of coronavirus, the first death from the virus in the U.S.. Both had underlying health conditions, and both were being treated at a hospital in Kirkland, Washington, east of Seattle.

Washington state now has 12 confirmed cases.

State and local authorities stepped up testing for the illness as the number of new cases grew nationwide, with new infections announced in California, Florida, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York and Washington state.

Authorities in the Seattle area reported four new cases Sunday night, including the man who died. Two health care workers in California were also diagnosed. Of the new Washington state cases, two were women, one in her 80s and another in her 90s. Both were in critical condition. A man in his 70s was also in critical condition. All three were from the LifeCare nursing facility in Kirkland, Washington, where health officials said 50 people are sick and being tested for the virus.

On Sunday night, the International Association of Fire Fighters said 25 members who responded to calls for help at the nursing facility are being quarantined.

The first U.S. case was a Washington state man who had visited China, where the virus first emerged, but several recent cases in the U.S. have had no known connection to travelers.

In California, two health care workers in the San Francisco Bay area who cared for an earlier coronavirus patient were diagnosed with the virus on Sunday, the Alameda and Solano counties said in a joint statement.

The health care workers are both employed at NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville, California, and had exposure to a patient treated there before being transferred to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, the statement said. That patient was the first person in the U.S. discovered to have contracted the coronavirus with no known overseas travel.

Alameda County declared a state of emergency on Sunday following the news.

In Oregon, the state Health Authority said Sunday that a second person in the state tested positive for the virus. The person is an adult in household contact with the first Oregonian to test positive and does not need medical attention, the authority said.

Elsewhere, authorities announced Sunday a third case in Illinois, a second in Rhode Island and a first case in New York as worried Americans swarmed stores to stock up on basic goods such as bottled water, canned foods and toilet paper.

The patients in Rhode Island were on a school trip to Italy together in February. A third person from the trip is being tested, and the school is shutting down for the week.

In New York, officials confirmed Sunday that a woman in her late 30s contracted the virus while traveling in Iran. She has been quarantined to her home in Manhattan.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Sunday that it was retesting someone in San Antonio, Texas, who had been released from isolation Saturday but later returned after a lab test was “weakly positive.” The patient had been treated a local medical facility for several weeks after returning from Wuhan, China. The agency said the patient had met the criteria for release and was asymptomatic. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff told the San Antonio Express-News that the patient was a woman who had come into contact with around a dozen people at a hotel. Both Wolff and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg expressed concerns over the patient’s initial release in a statement.

As the fallout continued, Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar sought to reassure the American public that the federal government is working to make sure state and local authorities are able to test for the virus. Both said during a round of TV talk show appearances Sunday that thousands more testing kits had been distributed to state and local officials, with thousands more to come.

“They should know we have the best public health system in the world looking out for them,” Azar said, adding that additional cases will be reported and the overall risk to Americans is low.

As the cases ticked up, some Americans stocked up on basic supplies — particularly in areas with diagnosed cases — and began to take note of the impact on daily life. Stores such as Costco sold out of toilet paper, bottled water and hand sanitizer outside Portland, Oregon, where a case was announced Friday. Sports games and practices were canceled into the coming school week. Some churches said they would not offer communion because of fears of viral spread.

As Americans prepared, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington on Sunday said they had evidence the virus may have been circulating in the state for up to six weeks undetected — a finding that, if true, could mean hundreds of undiagnosed cases in the area. They posted their research online, but it was not published in a scientific journal or reviewed by other scientists.

Trevor Bedford, an associate professor who announced the preliminary findings on the virus in Washington state, said on Twitter late Saturday that genetic similarities between the state’s first case on Jan. 20 and a case announced Friday indicated the newer case may have descended from the earlier one. The Jan. 20 case was the first known case in the U.S.

“I believe we’re facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China,” he said on Twitter.

Bedford did not immediately reply to an e-mail requesting an interview Sunday.

Scientists not affiliated with the research said the results did not necessarily surprise them and pointed out that for many people — especially younger, healthier ones — the symptoms are not much worse than a flu or bad cold.

“We think that this has a pretty high rate of mild symptoms and can be asymptomatic. The symptoms are pretty non-specific and testing criteria has been pretty strict, so those combinations of factors means that it easily could have been circulating for a bit without us knowing,” said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Adam Lauring of University of Michigan called the findings “high quality work” from scientists who’ve done similar work with the flu virus for years.

“They show their data and they show their work,” Lauring said. “It’s more than a series of tweets” because the researchers back up what they found with data that they’ve shared online. “If there’s something wrong, someone will find it.”

Dr. Carlos del Rio of Emory University School of Medicine said the findings are from respected researchers in genomic sequencing and they make sense because of the geographic proximity of the two cases.

“This is a good time to reinforce the things we all should be doing to stop the spread of flu. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. If you have a cold, stay home … It’s a good time to remind ourselves of that,” he said.

Pence, named by the president to be the point-person overseeing the government’s response, said more than 15,000 virus testing kits had been released over the weekend. And, the administration is working with a commercial provider to distribute 50,000 more, he said.

The vice president said testing was among the first issues raised by governors he’s spoken with so far. Several states have begun their own testing, including Washington state, Oregon and Illinois.

“We’re leaning into it,” Pence said.

Azar said more than 3,600 people already have been tested for coronavirus and the capability exists to test 75,000 people. He forecast a “radical expansion of that” in the coming weeks.

Pence and Azar spoke a day after President Donald Trump approved new restrictions on international travel to prevent the spread within the U.S. of the new virus, which originated in China. There are now more than 80,000 cases worldwide and about 3,000 deaths.

The number of known coronavirus cases in the U.S. had reached at least 80 as of Sunday, counting people evacuated from a cruise ship and Wuhan.

Trump said Saturday at a White House news conference that he was thinking about closing the southern border with Mexico as a precaution. Azar said Sunday that Mexico has few coronavirus cases and that it would take a dramatic change in the circumstances there to prompt serious consideration of a border shutdown.

The president, Azar said, “was trying to say everything’s on the table.”

“We will take whatever measures are appropriate and necessary to protect the American people, but we don’t forecast doing that any time soon,” he said of closing the border.

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This story has been corrected to reflect that the hospitalized patient in Rhode Island is a man, not a woman, who traveled to Italy in February.

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Flaccus reported from Portland, Oregon. AP writers Darlene Superville in Washington and Chris Grygiel in Seattle contributed.