I've decided to write a blog about this virus because I have a very unusual perspective. While, I don't currently live in China I not only have a lot of friends who do, but I also lived through the last coronavirus outbreak in China.
I first moved to China is August of 2002. In January 2003, I traveled to Hong Kong for a retreat. Little did I know, at the end of 2002 a coronavirus that became known as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) had jumped from bats, to civet cats to humans. This leap to humans occurred a an exotic animal marked in Guangdong province (also know in English as Canton). It was completely covered up by the Chinese until the outbreak reached Hong Kong. Matter of fact, living in China I was under the belief for a long time that this virus had begun I Hong Kong rather than on the mainland (Guangdong province borders Hong Kong and many people from Guangdong travel regularly to Hong Kong because foreign products are available there without the heavy import tariffs found on the mainland).
As the virus continued to spread and sicken many more people, the government downplayed its severity. People were led to believe that it wasn't serious and that the outbreak was much smaller than it really was. We lived on in peaceful oblivion.
Eventually, SARS began to kill people in other countries and the Chinese government had to admit to the scope of the problem. At this point, things got crazy. I was teaching English at an English training center run by an iron and steel company (my students were engineers, accountants, human resource officers and so forth for the company) and we were first told to wear masks whenever we went out and to wash our hands. Bathrooms across China began to have soap provided (you may be reading this and going, "what? No soap?" Most public restrooms in China didn't have soap and after the outbreak passed the soap was once again removed. Hand dryers were also installed (after SARS passed these were disconnected - paper towels, in general and rarely been available in China). I remember my students and I went out to a local park one day. When we returned we lined up to wash our hands in the bathroom. As he was waiting in line on of my adult students spit on the floor (spitting on the floor, the sidewalk, just about anywhere was once a big part of life in China, but in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics the government worked hard to curb this practice and while it still happens, it isn't as common as it once was). I was in shock and I remember scolding him for it (kind of funny since at only 24 my students were all older than me)
As the outbreak worsened, so did the controls. Eventually, the iron and steel company suspended classes. I was instructed not to go shopping. For grocery shopping I must wear a mask and it would be better if I shopped at outdoor markets rather than supermarkets so that I would have less exposure to people. I was also told not to take the bus or go in other people's houses, but as long as they weren't sick I was allowed to have visitors to mine. I was given a thermometer and required to measure my temperature daily.
Life quickly got boring. Mostly my only company was my 67 year-old teammate. A wonderful woman, but not someone I had a lot in common with. Over time I developed a schedule. I would get up early in the morning around 6 am and go play badminton outside with the neighbors before they went to work. Then I would come in and read until lunchtime (which my teammate cooked) Then I would sleep all afternoon. I would get up around the time my neighbors would come home and I would go out and talk with people until dark. We would stand at a distance and all wear masks, but it really helped my Chinese to spend a couple of hours every evening talking to people. When it got dark out, I would go inside and use AOL messenger to chat (in text form) with friends back in the States (even though it was 2003 I only had dial-up Internet). Rinse and repeat.
My classes were canceled for a month around the end of that month I had a German friend come to visit. He decided that having this opportunity was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and so he didn't cancel his trip. His flight into China was so empty that everyone on the plane had an entire row of seats to themselves. I told my foreign affairs officer with the training center that I had a friend coming to visit from New Zealand (he's German, but he was studying in New Zealand at the time), but I didn't learn for two years that there was a translation problem. When I told my foreign affairs officer that my friend was a physicist he mixed that English word up with physician and translated it to the bosses as a doctor friend. It turns out that the iron and steel company didn't put him under a mandatory quarantine because they thought, "if the western doctor isn't worried, neither are we."
By the time my friend arrived, it felt like things were improving. While he was there my teammate, a student and my friend and I traveled by public bus to a monastery. He and I went on a bike ride with a Chinese friend of mine and then we went out to eat afterwards (we went out for a Chinese hotpot which was the only type of restaurant open because in a hot pot you get a boiling broth that you use to cook the food at your table). However, towards the end of his stay, I received a phone call from the nonprofit organization in the States that I was teaching through. They had decided to cancel the rest of our program that year. Most of that decision was because we had had less than half of the program and there were no longer enough weeks left for the students to take enough classes to receive their certificates. As long as we remained under 50% of the course-time the students would be able to take the course again.
Despite the reason for canceling the rest of our program, they wanted us out within the week. Through email, I used a Beijing-based travel agent to book our flights out. For my flight, I had to spend a night in a hotel in Seoul, South Korean. There were so few flights I couldn't make the trip from Beijing to North Carolina in one day (my family wouldn't let me go to Alaska until I had been out of China for at least two weeks because SARS affected the elderly more and they didn't want me anywhere near my grandmother until I was clear of the incubation period). However, when our foreign affairs officer went to an agent to buy our plane tickets to Beijing, he discovered another problem: the flights from Baotou to Beijing had been reduced to 1 per day. My teammate's flight was schedule for the very next day and so she had to fly out that evening (I believe the flight departed at 5). He tried to call us from the agent's office, but two of our students were contacting all our other students from the entire year to plan a goodbye lunch for the next day. One was using the phone in my apartment and the other was using the phone in her apartment. After trying, unsuccessfully, to reach us for several minutes he began biking to our apartments as fast as he could. He got there completely out of breath and could barely sputter out that she had to leave on a flight that was departing in only a couple of hours (and the airport was a 30 minute drive away). He arranged transportation to the airport while the students and I helped my teammate pack at lightning speed. When she got to the airport and had a problem with an item in her bag she had no idea where it was because she hadn't packed. We got her to the airport about 45 minutes before departure time, but she made her flight (Back then you had to go to a separate counter and pay an airport tax. Then take the receipt to the check-in counter, but they let her check-in while our foreign affairs officer went to pay the tax).
That night I went to a goodbye dinner with the training center leaders and the next day I went to lunch with the students. The staff at the restaurant were all wearing masks, but we were not. Looking back I think its funny that the last things I did before leaving because of SARS was go out to two different restaurants with large groups of people.
I also had to leave Baotou a day before my flight because of the flight situation (there were trains running, but since it was a 14 hour train ride, they were deemed too risky). We arranged for my nonprofit's staff in Beijing to arrange a hotel for me. Unfortunately, when we were approaching Beijing there were thunderstorms and my flight was diverted to Tianjin. We sat on the ground for about an hour in Tianjin and the uncle of the girl traveling beside me let use his cellphone to notify them of my late arrival. I then took a taxi to the campus of the school were these staff members taught. My flight had put me beyond curfew when the gates to their school would be locked so they had to get permission to be let back onto campus after taking me to my hotel (I arrived before that, but too late for them to take me to my hotel and return in time). The next morning, I took a taxi to the airport and departed China. I had a hotel in Seoul paid for by the airline and then I continued to Dallas. My flight from Dallas to Greensboro was delayed by two hours and by the time we departed I was so exhausted I slept through take-off. All told, it took me three-days to make it from Baotou, Inner Mongolia China to North Carolina.
In some ways my experience was very similar to what is happening now and in many ways it is different. During SARS, all but one of the gates into my apartment complex was locked at all times. I have friends in China who describe a similar situation today. School was canceled. This was announced during a Chinese holiday and schools are not yet schedule to be back in session, but it has already been announced they will be fettered. When I was there during SARS there was not much in the way of social media and the government covered things up longer. Internet access was also much scarcer and things like doing online classes were not a possibility. I have friends who will be expected to teach their classes online starting from the day school was supposed to start. SARS couldn't infect people until they were symptomatic, this new virus appears to be contagious for days (or longer) before a person displays any symptoms. SARS infected about 8000 people in total. The numbers for this virus are already over 5000 and it is still early. At this point in the SARS outbreak China was still covering it up. The good news is this virus seems to be less fatal, but since it takes people a long time to die, that may not actually be accurate. During SARS many patients need ventilators and the hospitals in China ran out (this was a big reason my family wanted me back home. If I contracted the virus I could get better care at home).
Many people have asked me what I thought about the quarantine of Wuhan and other cities in China. I don't think it will be effective at all. China is a country very concerned with face (I usually write nothing along these lines for fear of having my visa revoked or not being issued future visas). During SARS they lost a lot of face in the global community. I believe these large quarantines and the shut down of everything from festivals to trains to work units (most companies have been ordered not to re-open after the Chinese New Year holiday) is more about this then actually being a useful method. After all, they announced they were going to shut down transportation to Wuhan more than 24 hours before they did so. Many people, who may have contracted the virus, fled. Patient's have been found all over China and many western sources believe the infection rates are actually much higher than reported (they believe that this is due to lack of test kits). I'm afraid China's economy is going to tank, but I'm not that worried about the virus harming my friends. From what I've seen this coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as the flu, which kills thousands of people each year in the U.S. alone, but it is highly contagious and the fear levels are high. I try to reassure my friends living in China. I don't think it will really turn into a deadly outbreak like the Spanish flu or the plague have in centuries past. I do think they are going to have some scary times because there is a lot of panic and hype. I honestly think the downplaying and lack of social media during SARS made it at least emotionally easier to handle (I am not saying that I agree with the cover-up, just that the hype on this one is scaring people unnecessarily). To any friends in China who made read this: stay strong. Look for routine because the destruction of daily routines is part of what makes this so scary. From one coronavirus outbreak survivor to future coronavirus outbreak survivors I tell you: You can make it through this. It really will be okay.
