Evacuated From Wuhan, Law Prof Is Under 14-Day Mandatory Coronavirus Quarantine

Among the hundreds of Americans evacuated out of Wuhan, China, this week amid the escalating coronavirus outbreak was Chunlin Leonhard, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Leonhard, who has shown no signs of illness, arrived back in the United States on Thursday and is now under a two-week federally mandated quarantine at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California. She and her fellow passengers are being housed in a hotel on the base but aren’t allowed to leave the grounds or have visitors, Leonhard said in a phone interview Thursday.

“I have plenty of things to do,” she said, less than a day into her quarantine. “It doesn’t bother me that much except for the fact that my freedom is being deprived.”

Leonard had been in Beijing since September, after winning a Fulbright scholarship to spend the academic year researching ancient Chinese dynastic contract law issues. She traveled to Songzi—a city in Hubei province about 250 miles from Wuhan—on Jan. 20 to celebrate the Chinese New Year with family.

At the time, coronavirus was not yet a major concern. But within days, Wuhan and the entire province began to shut down amid the growing outbreak. (As of Thursday, nearly 600 have died in China and more than 28,000 had been sickened by the coronavirus.) Leonhard’s flight back to Beijing was cancelled, and she was essentially stuck in Songzi.

Leonhard said she wasn’t initially concerned about the virus. She continued to take walks outside and tried to maintain some normalcy, much to the chagrin of her concerned family members.

“People were scared,” she said. “They were panicking. News and rumors were spreading. There was a lot of misinformation flying around the Internet.”

The situation got more complicated Jan. 31, when the Fulbright program suspended its operations in China due to coronavirus concerns. All Fulbright scholars in the country were ordered to leave China or have their funding cancelled.

Leonhard didn’t want to jeopardize her Fulbright scholarship, but she had a problem: She had no way to get out of China. Highways throughout the province were shut down and roadblocks prevented travel, not that there were any flights leaving Wuhan anyway. She contacted the Beijing-based administrator of the Fulbright program in China for help, who put her in touch with officials at the U.S. Embassy. (The U.S. consulate in Wuhan closed in late January, so no local assistance was available to Americans.)

The next four days were stressful as Leonhard explained her situation again and again to various American bureaucrats. They eventually secured her a seat on a chartered flight out of Wuhan, but she still had the issue of how to get to the airport.

“I told them: ‘I need help to get to Wuhan because I’m stuck here 400 kilometers away,’” Leonhard recalled. “ ‘I need help to get out. I can’t get a permit on my own.’ ”

After days of back and fourth—and less than 24 hours until the chartered flight was scheduled to leave Wuhan—U.S. officials secured passage through the many roadblocks to get the evacuees to Wuhan. Traveling thought the empty city was eerie, Leonhard said

“It was like a ghost city,” she said. “It was really bizarre not to see anybody on the street. It was unnerving to be in that environment.”

Unfortunately, the scene at the Wuhan airport—which was abandoned except for evacuation flights by several countries—was disorganized. The U.S. evacuees waited around for hours with little word from officials. When officials did arrive, they mistakenly separated some families among the two flights before realizing their error, Leonhard said.

“It was really a disappointing performance by the U.S. government, or the representatives of the U.S. government,” she said.

One of the two flights was bound for San Diego, while Leonhard’s headed to Travis Air Force Base, in between San Francisco and Sacramento.

“As soon as I landed, they handed me a court order that basically said we’re quarantined for 14 days because we were exposed to the coronavirus and there’s a reasonable belief that we’d be traveling state to state,” she said.

For now, the quarantine isn’t too bad, Leonhard said. The evacuees can go outside, though they must remain within the fencing of the hotel grounds. They get three meals delivered each day, in addition to mandatory temperature checks.

“I have Internet access,” she said. “I collected a lot of materials in China, so I can work on my law review article on ancient Chinese contract law. My research continues regardless.”