The COVID-19 outbreak began in Wuhan, China. Photo courtesy of the New York Times.
Ping Xu got to see firsthand how differently the United States and China handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xiu, a political science professor at the University of Rhode Island, was in Wuhan, China at the start of the pandemic and was brought back to the U.S. by the U.S. State Department in late January.
On April 14, Xu held a virtual event through the political science department where she discussed her experiences of her evacuation from China and the differences she sees between the U.S. and China’s containment methods.
“We drove about three hours from where we were to the airport in Wuhan, where we boarded the airplane,” Xu said. “We actually had to wait for over 10 hours before we could board the airplane. After we got back to the United States we finished a 14-day federal, mandatory quarantine at the March Air Force Base in California.”
According to Xu, that was the first federal quarantine in the U.S. over 60 years, the last one being held in the 1960s during an outbreak of smallpox.
Xu and her family were very lucky to have received a seat on the plane back to the United States, as there were over 1,000 Americans in the Hubei province trying to get back home, and only 200 seats available on the plane. According to Xu, her family was either featured in or contacted by every national news network or publication to tell her story. The media coverage helped Xu and her family get enough attention to get back home to the US.
“The University of Rhode Island also helped,” Xu said. “My colleagues, Professor Brian Kreuger [and] Marc Hutchison reached out to the University and they also helped us connect with Senator Jack Reed. They helped us get in touch with the State Department. It was definitely an ordeal for us to get on the airplane and get back here, especially with two young children.”
The airport in Wuhan that Xu flew out of was opened only for her flight back to the U.S. and the Japanese government flying their citizens home as well. China was under a lockdown and people were mostly confined in their homes, unable to travel most places.
“The airport in Wuhan was empty when we went to the airport to board that charter flight,” Xu said. “It was completely empty. I’ve never seen something like that. This is the only airport for a city with over 11 million people. In more rural areas, roads are also blocked. People couldn’t even go from one village to another by car.”
Xu used her presentation to also examine the juxtaposition of the United States and China’s COVID-19 coping solutions and experiences.
With much speculation around the Chinese case-reporting amount circling currently, Xu believes that the current, public information is “as trustworthy as it can be.” China initially was underreporting due to a lack of testing, but began to account for all citizens that showed symptoms in their statistics, making the numbers credible, according to Xu.
Xu compared the make-shift hospitals that China developed during their outbreak to the United States’, specifically those in New York. However, one notable difference highlighted was isolation centers. In China, they have been able to place all COVID-19 patients in isolation-designed centers, often using hotels to do so, in an effort to contain the spread. The United States currently has people confined to their homes, rather than creating these isolation centers. According to Xu, this is mostly because in China, families often live with extended family members, in most cases, grandparents, which means if one person got infected, it could easily spread to the elderly.
The final major difference between the U.S. and China’s policy around COVID-19 is that all Chinese provinces asides from Hubei were required to help all of the counties within Hubei province by sending supplies, personal protective equipment and medical personnel, according to Xu.
“As soon as COVID-19 became the number one national priority, the Chinese central government unionized all its centralized political power to punch the outbreak,” Xu said.
Xu dedicated half of her presentation time to answering the WebEx audience’s questions.
Political science Professor Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz asked Xu whether or not she ultimately regretted getting on the plane back to the United States.
“I regret and I don’t regret,” Xu said. “I regret because we are stuck here and I really fear that either me or [my husband] would get sick and no one would care for our children because if we’re sick and potentially our kids can carry the disease or carry the virus, who knows. In China, I think we have options in terms of childcare. In that sense, I do regret, but I ultimately feel very lucky that we are back here.”