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Escaping Wuhan: Chinese-American on her evacuation from coronavirus-hit city
- Wuhan-born Ningxi Xu had to leave her parents behind, but says they were ‘relieved’ she is away from the epicentre
- Now under quarantine, Xu will have to repay the US government for the extraction, to the tune of around US$1,000
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Ningxi Xu first heard about the outbreak of an unknown pneumonia-like disease in China from a fellow plane passenger, hours before she was set to land in Wuhan to spend the Lunar New Year with her family.
Xu, 30, brushed it off. It couldn’t have been a big issue as she hadn’t yet seen anything in the news, she reasoned.
But from the moment her father picked her up from the airport wearing a face mask, her perception of the situation began to shift. Wuhan’s streets grew empty. Reports of people contracting the disease flooded her phone daily. News of family friends falling ill reached their home.
As of Friday, more than 720 people have been killed by the new coronavirus – which China’s National Health Commission on Saturday named the “novel coronavirus pneumonia”, or NCP for short – and Xu now finds herself quarantined on a California airbase, one of several hundred US citizens to have been evacuated from Wuhan on US government-chartered aircraft.
Besides the tedium of a federally mandated 14-day quarantine, Xu, who landed in the US on Wednesday, considers herself lucky.
“[I’ve] won the lottery in this case,” she says, speaking from her small room on the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, the San Diego military base of Top Gun fame.
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