Beijing Part 1

my sister’s story about being detained in china for the swine flu scare.

charwang:

I’m in Beijing and since Meltz doesn’t have internet at his apt, so I only get limited use when I go to his lab. When I flew to China, I had a layover in Shanghai and we were told to fill out a quarantine form. The form asked if we had any of the listed symptoms in the past 7 days and I was dumb enough to answer honestly through the advice of my parents. I marked that I had a cough and was told to speak to one of the quarantine inspectors. They had already checked my fever on the plane twice with some laser gun and then again at the airport. The lady told me I’d probably be fine since I didn’t have a fever and sent my papers up to the office upstairs. This was obviously just a ploy because they ended up detaining anyone who was dumb enough not to lie (there were definitely people on my plane coughing). So, I get told I’m being detained and I try to keep a cool head (which is rare) because I didn’t want to get detained for longer than necessary. We are sent downstairs to a special waiting room, where everyone was pretty calm except one lady who was hysterical. They pretty much had to get security to handle her. After waiting for 3 hours in this waiting room, this other girl and I were taken away to the hospital in an ambulance. She was the same age as me and just returning from college in Australia and we got to talking. Apparently, she did the same thing I did. So we go to this rural hospital named Nan Hua and are detained there. This epidemiologist from the Chinese CDC comes to interview me about my interactions with people who are sick and my routine for the previous week. Afterwards, they draw my blood — not sure if that needle was sterile, but let’s hope it was — and swab my nose and mouth. They tell me they’re sending it out for H1N1 testing and it will be done in 8-9 hours. The hospital was much too unsanitary for any American hospital. There were tons of mosquitoes flying around and I spent the whole night swatting them away and being terrified of being bitten. I ended up getting 1 bug bite. In the morning after finally flagging down someone who worked there (surprisingly there was no one monitoring us), they confirmed that my tests were negative and released me. From there, I had to take a taxi back to the Pu Dong Shanghai Airport because the airline/government did not arrange my transportation. Then I was finally on my way back to Beijing. When I got to Beijing, I couldn’t figure out how to reach Meltz because my phone wasn’t working. So I called my dad and had him call Meltz after not being able to reach my uncle either. Pretty much epic fail.