A horror story of 3 months of quarantine

Before boarding her flight from Los Angeles to the Chinese city of Guangzhou, Xue Liangquan, a California-based lawyer, knew she was in for a bit of a headache.

To visit her parents in the eastern province of Shandong in January, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, Xue, 37, had already disbursed $7,600 in airline tickets. He had submitted to the GOC the negative test results, as required for entry. Upon arrival, he would have to complete three weeks of quarantine.

Even so, he could never foresee the ordeal he was going to suffer. Xue, due to a Kafkaesque streak of bad luck and confrontations with the inflexible Chinese rules on the virus, would spend the next three months in quarantine, bouncing between hospitals and hotel rooms. When he came out of one round of isolation, he was immediately ordered another. By the time of his return flight, he would have had about two days of freedom in China. He wouldn't have seen his parents at all.

“It was like a nightmare,” Xue said in an interview from California, where she returned earlier this month and wrote an article on the social media platform WeChat about her experience. “I thought that, if I didn't write it, it would feel even more like a nightmare: as if I had a bad dream in my Los Angeles bed on January 1, woke up on April 1 and still in my bed in Los Angeles, and the time in between would have disappeared.”

China has been applying some of the strictest quarantine restrictions in the world for more than two years, in its unwavering quest for “Covid zero”. Wuhan, the city where the pandemic started, was closed for two months. Shanghai, which is currently fighting its worst Covid outbreak, has been paralyzed for two weeks. International travel to and from China is almost non-existent.

The restrictions have been the source of much debate, both at home and abroad. Even Xue's blog post, which was widely shared on Chinese social media, elicited polarized reactions: some readers expressed their horror, others called it prime material for a comedy film, and others attacked Xue for returning to China, denouncing it as a decision who ran the risk of introducing the virus into the country.

Xue, who was born in China and moved to the United States seven years ago, remains resolutely neutral. “I don't blame anyone: any person, government or organization,” he said. “I can only blame myself, for being so unlucky.”

His unfortunate journey began on January 2, when, armed with a negative Covid test, he took off from Los Angeles. In Guangzhou, he underwent a new test and was sent to a quarantine hotel. His room was a pleasant surprise: it even had a large Jacuzzi. He thought the next few weeks would be like a mini-vacation.

But it wasn't like that. Just as he was about to lie down to rest, he received a phone call informing him that the airport test had tested positive. He would be taken to a hospital by ambulance.

Xue put on the comprehensive protective equipment left at the door with difficulty. His breath fogged his glasses and face shield. “The only thing I could see were the drops of water that fell incessantly,” he wrote on his blog.

He spent the next four weeks in a hospital, sharing a room with two other patients. He videotaped with his parents every day, assuring them that his symptoms were mild. He took pictures of his food to show them that he was eating well. (Actually, Xue said, he only took pictures of the best foods, so they wouldn't worry.) He worked remotely for the law firm he had founded.

On January 31, the eve of the Lunar New Year - the biggest holiday in China, which he hoped to spend with his family - he watched the Spring Festival Gala, a televised show, on his tablet, alone in bed.

He had little contact with his peers; no one was really in the mood to socialize, Xue said.

“At first, I felt quite depressed,” he said. “The only thing you can do is suffer. And, within your limited capacity, organize your daily life to the best of your ability. When you have to shower, take a shower. When you have to brush your teeth, brush.”

On February 1, he was discharged from the hospital, and transferred to another, for recovered patients, for two more weeks of “medical observation”.

But even after that, his ordeal was only halfway there.

After leaving the second hospital, Xue flew to Shanghai, where she had relatives. He had given up going to Shandong, as his quarantine rules were stricter than those in Shanghai at the time. The test that was done there, as required by local regulations, was negative. For the first time in a month, I was free.

It lasted two days. On February 19, health authorities in Guangzhou notified him that the only other man he had shared a bus with since the last hospital had tested positive. That made Xue a close contact, which means that she now had to spend 14 days in quarantine in a hotel.

Then, on March 6 - the same day he was going to be released from that quarantine - he received another call. An official told him that he had tested positive again. Xue demanded proof, but the official refused, he said. “The hardest thing for me was the lack of certainty,” he said. “Every time I thought that a stage was over, and that I was about to be free, the nightmare would return.”

And so began again a procedure with which Xue was now too familiar. Two more weeks in a medical facility. Two more weeks in a hotel.

Finally, on March 31, Xue was released, for real. But, exhausted by his ordeal, he had given up hope of seeing his parents and booked a flight back to the United States on April 1. The only relative he saw was his younger brother, in Shanghai.

Once upon a time, Xue would have felt desolate. Living abroad, he said, he had cherished for a long time, he had even become obsessed with the idea of home. But the weeks of isolation have given him a new perspective.

“We want to return home and get together, so that our lives, which have been separated, will cross again. But if we've tried and we haven't succeeded, I don't regret anything,” he said. “I still have to be held accountable for myself. I cannot, for the sake of this reunion, sacrifice another three months.”

Xue is sympathetic to China's controls. The country's population is so large and aging so rapidly, he said, that living with the virus could be disastrous.

But he himself will not try to return until the restrictions have been eased. “Otherwise, I think I would still feel somewhat traumatized,” he said. “I'm really quite scared.”

(C) The New York Times.-

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