Two Quarantine Experiences: East and West Coast

This post is a side-by-side comparison of Alexander Lee and Michael Heister's travel and quarantine experiences. The two know each other from weekly trivia at Tristan's Cal-Mex in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

Alexander returned solo to the United States, landing in JFK International Airport in New York City on Monday, February 17. Michael returned with his Chinese wife and their daughter to LAX, in Los Angeles, California on February 5.

Why did you return to the United States?

A: The United States government issued a warning that we should depart by commercial means on Feb. 2. Some subsequent messages did not repeat that verbiage, but by February 10, I had purchased a $1,555 round-trip ticket. My family was safe on the 14th floor of a gated community in a section of the city, an island, on which no diagnoses of COVID-19 had been reported. My partner supported my departure and we planned to reunite in the U.S. as soon as possible. I believed that I could be a better advocate for them outside of China's Great Firewall and that, having recently re-watched The Sand Pebbles (1966) with my girlfriend and her son, it is generally a good idea to depart when your government gives that order--no matter how much you dislike the current Administration or its draconian policies. I was unclear about the level of accurate reporting inside China or the rate at which the disease was going to continue to spread when I bought my ticket on February 10. By my date of departure, it had slowed to a trickle.  Since I left there have been no new reported cases in Guangzhou. 

M: We--American citizen husband, Chinese citizen wife with tourist visa, daughter with American passport--flew out of Guangzhou on February 5, after some hiccups. We'd arrived at the airport in the morning, having booked a cheap one-stop flight through Seoul to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. We had even received an email from Korean Air that all was well. Literally an hour or less before we got to the counter, the South Korean government had changed its policy, and was not allowing any Chinese citizens to transfer through Seoul without South Korean visas. Our young daughter and I could continue if we chose, but my wife could not. She gallantly offered to stay. I nixed that practically before the words were out of her mouth. She spent a couple of hours on her phone finding the alternative that best suited us. I felt at that moment - emotions running a bit high - like our options were shrinking rapidly, and didn't want to risk any other transfers, especially through airports in mainland China. She booked us a same-day direct flight to LAX. If it was just my wife and me, we'd have toughed it out, but we'd already passed nearly two weeks in our apartment in voluntary let's-avoid-people-and-public-places isolation, and we really felt that if we stayed, we'd be asking a LOT of our six-year-old--especially since we were privileged/blessed with other options. We really felt that if we stayed, we would be asking her to put much of her life on-hold for an indefinite period of time.

When you got off the plane, what happened before you left the airport?

A: I stood in a line to have my temperature taken by an airport employee. When that was complete, we proceeded to immigration and passport control. After passport control, under the supervision of both a major and captain of the uniformed Public Health Service, a row of fold-up tables served as a check-in station with CDC. The workers, in their new khaki CDC vests, appeared to be new employees or even possibly volunteers.

The woman who helped me said, "We are telling people that it is a good idea to quarantine for two weeks." At this point, she was interrupted by a colleague, who said, "You can't tell him it is mandatory. You have to tell him it is optional." I interrupted this worker to say, "I don't want to be part of the spread of an international disease. My friends would never forgive me so I am going to self-quarantine. She did indicate it is optional." The woman helping me then asked for a phone number. I provided my parents' and said, "Please don't call that unless you need to." I was presented with some papers from CDC and the NY Department of Health, mostly in Chinese, that explained what health precautions were recommended (e.g., wash your hands!).

M: We touched down around 6 PM, and had to wait just a few minutes before disembarking. We were greeted at the end of the jetway by CDC personnel who took our temperature and quizzed us about where we'd traveled and how we felt. Our daughter, quite honestly, told the CDC she had trouble breathing through the mask, and didn't like it. We were handed a form suggesting we monitor our temperature for 14 days. We were not placed under any mandatory orders of quarantine or isolation. We experienced a three-hour-plus wait in line at passport control at LAX, as there was an extra processing step there with the CDC as well. At the final window, the customs officer chose to send my wife upstairs for additional processing or whatever benign-sounding bureaucratic term they use. This entailed an additional three-hour wait for our daughter and me downstairs while my wife waited upstairs. Customs interrogated her for just a few minutes about where she was from, what she planned to do in the U.S., and so on. Very friendly. Then the officer asked an assumptive question about my wife being from Wuhan, and she quickly corrected him. He was satisfied with her answer, and she met us downstairs a bit past 1 AM.

What happened after you left the airport?

Isolation and Quarantine Agreement signed on 2/20/2020

A: I went to the AirTrain and took it to Federal Circle, distancing myself from other passengers, but no longer wearing the mask that we had been asked to wear throughout the flight on China Airlines. At Federal Circle, I picked up a reserved rental car from the Budget desk and drove to Upstate New York, stopping along the way in Scranton, PA, to have dinner at a Thai restaurant. I spent two weeks at the same location and, having arrived on February 17th, my parents got a call on February 19th from a very kind RN at the county health department, which is responsible for the address I had given the CDC workers when I gave them the phone number. To this point, nobody had warned me that an initial in-person visit from public health workers would be necessary. They came out on the morning of the 20th with a care package of gloves, surgical masks, Purell, Chlorox wipes, Kleenex, and a very nice quality thermometer. I was told to take my temperature twice per day--once in the morning and once in the evening--then report the readings to them in the morning of each subsequent day of voluntary quarantine. I also recorded these on a sheet provided by them in a folder that had a list of local hospitals with Emergency Rooms. They left me with another paper from the CDC on health precautions.  After the quarantine, I drove to their offices and retrieved a letter from them that certified I had completed my two weeks in quarantine.

M: We rented a car, drove close to an hour, and checked into a motel. The following day, we drove the rest of the way to Las Vegas. We did not wear our masks, but we did keep a reasonable distance from other people.

How was the experience of your quarantine?

A: It was qualitatively different than the January 23 to February 17 period that I had spent mostly home bound, leaving only to sit in the car while my partner bought vegetables and supplies in an open-air market. It was qualitatively different than the two two-week writer's retreats that I did in 1999 and 2009. In fact, it was harrowing. The lack of clarity about when and how my family would be able to join me did not help. The around the clock care and feeding of a wood stove while it snowed, rained, and blew a gale combined with jet-lag and anxiety led to many nights of poor sleep. I spent entirely too much time on the Internet, getting sucked into arguments about politics and meeting half of the mean, brutal trolls on the Internet. I argued with my boss, my board chair, my parents, my girlfriend, and lost a very old friend for being both dismissive of his Democratic Primary candidate-of-choice and also vehemently disagreeing about whether we should be scaremongering about the virulence of COVID-19. I cooked, blogged here, and talked on the phone incessantly. I waged a campaign with my Congressman to get the Department of State to declare whether their language "should depart" actually meant that we should depart. The Department responded that we "should" and that their recommendation had not changed, despite subsequent alerts that did not repeat that verbiage.

M: Our experience was obviously quite different, as we departed almost two weeks before Alexander, and were not required to quarantine or isolate. We chose on our own to turn in the rental car and minimize our time outside my brother's home as much as reasonably possible. After 14 days, we rented a car again, enrolled our daughter in a local elementary school, and were out and about as we pleased. As for our daughter, while being in an American school is a fresh challenge for her, she is enjoying spending time with her older cousin here.

Doxology Handwashing Timer

Burning Money: My "Fool's Errand" to the Homeland

UPDATE(S): Since this post on Thursday morning of March 5, there have been additional costs associated with the journey, which I have added to this accounting in red. I will continue to update this until I return to China.

I do not feel the need to explain myself, despite the judgmental and horrible things that people have said before and after my arrival on this, my native soil. As my readers know, I have come back because the United States government told Americans living abroad that they "should depart by commercial means." It was not "if you choose to depart, you must use commercial means" because, in fact, the consulates are under-staffed in China and staying there is a bit of a The Sand Pebbles-esque decision. (More on that in a later post.)

Some of you may have seen an article from the Old Grey Lady about being a pariah and the stigma of a Returnee. Today, there is another article about how the rich and super-rich are preparing.

On the other hand, a full accounting of the expenses that I have encountered since my return and some anticipated expenses appears below. I am offering this not so much as a word of caution to my friends in China who might be considering a similar "junket," but more as an explainer to the public of what is involved in such an endeavor. It would be financially devastating for the vast majority of the people with whom I work in China.

This accounting does not include taxi expenses to the airport in Guangzhou or any cash expenses that I may have spent with the cash dollars that I had in my wallet prior to arrival.

It also does not include the ongoing family expense of paying rent in China for the apartment that houses my girlfriend and kids. I am lucky to have a partner who can pay for food and basics for the family without my help during this time, but many people will not have that luxury.

It also does not include the future expenses that I anticipate: food for the next couple weeks until planned return; another rental car or public transportation (will it ever be responsible to sit among others for several hours) to get back to the airport; etc.

• Airfare to Date  

• My flight home was 10,900 RMB ($1,555). It is a round-trip ticket set to return in June. The change fee from our travel agent, which I assume is at cost passed on from the airline, is 1,100 RMB (about $158). 
• If I choose to return on March 18, it will cost me another 1,180 RMB (approx. $170 at today's rates), which I shelled out today because tickets are flying out the door as Chinese people realize that it might be safer to return than weather this in the Land of the Free, Home of the Daring. 




• Rental Car Fees to Date 

•  The first car that I kept for 24 hours was picked up at JFK and dropped off at Ithaca Airport. It cost was supposed to cost $234.90 with a base price of $172.20, taxes and fees of 62.70 and I agreed to pay the $10 for the collision damage plan, but I was subsequently charged $268.40 and have not called to find out what the additional costs were. 
•  But I was charged $14.00 for EZPass tolls based on the license plate of the car. 
• The second car that I picked up in Horseheads, NY, and dropped off in Hudson, NY, cost $144.00 plus the collision damage plan of $30. 
• The third car, which I plan to keep through Saturday, was picked up at a different rental car location (not an airport, which saves money) in Hudson and will be dropped off in the Seacoast of New Hampshire. It is expected to cost $257.77 plus a $40 collision damage plan, which is a far sight cheaper than an extending the Hertz rental by the same amount of time.

• Lodging to Date 

• AirBNB from Monday, February 17 (the day that I arrived at JFK from Beijing) to Wednesday, March 4 cost me $625.95. 
• Then another $62.76 for a single night in Leeds, NY, at The Hodepodge Lodge AirBNB. Leeds is across the Hudson River from Town of Hudson, where I needed to return my rental and where I expected to borrow a friend's Subaru; however, I do not drive stick/standard and after about 600 feet of practice, I was not not confident, so decided to rent another car after three hours of calling both Travelocity and Hertz (long hold times and multiple disconnects due to poor cell service or incompetence on their end). By the time I reimburse my friend for sending his key and send it back to him, it will be roughly $60 through the USPS. 
• I am fortunate to be headed to a farmhouse for the duration of my stay that belongs to a friend in the Seacoast of New Hampshire
  

• Public Carrier Transportation to and from Rental Car facilities

   
• It was $65 from the Ithaca Airport to my AirBNB on Day Two of Quarantine. That was the drop off point for my Budget rental at Federal Circle, the car rental location associated with JFK.
•  I gave a Benjamin Franklin ($100) to my Superhost for driving me to the car rental place in Horseheads, about an hour away. A taxi would have cost $165. There was no offer of a shuttle despite multiple calls to the Hertz location, explaining that neither Lyft nor Uber were responding to calls in my rural area. (Not sure about the range of the shuttles that Hertz might offer, but a guy dropping his car off at Enterprise yesterday was shuttled home in it by one of their employees.)
• $12.43 for a Lyft from Hertz to Enterprise since keeping the car from Hertz for three more days was going to cost

• Gasoline 

• $21.45 at Mirabito in Ithaca to return compact car (hybrid) to Airport drop-off with a full tank
• $30.71 of gas from Stewart's Shops in Catskill, NY to return the Hertz vehicle full in Hudson.
• $30.84 at Irving in Hartford, VT to add  gas to the not-so-minivan that Enterprise rented to me
  
  

• Healthcare 

• $401.78 for health coverage from the exchange for the month of March. (Yes, Mom, I was uncovered from Feb. 17 to Leap Day, because my employer's insurance was not portable and HR did not remind me to get travel insurance.)
• $37.95 for a flu shot at Kinney Drugs in Seneca Falls, NY (yes, home of the 1848 convention!). It will be re-imburseable, but I had not yet received insurance card with number.
  
  

• Food and Meals 

•  $252.45 for a Forks Over Knives diet (no meat and mostly fresh food) at the Green Star Coop in Ithaca. (I was asymptomatic and wearing a mask. I called in advance to see if they could prepare the order, but they only had a not in-house delivery service that would have cost a lot so I did my own shopping, somewhat irresponsibly.)
• Lots of free squash and canned goods, as well as a spice cabinet and probably $100 to $200 of other edible supplies from host. 
• Forgotten amount for restaurant meal in Scranton, PA, but roughly $40.
  

• Incidentals 

•  The SIM card, necessary for getting Apple to call you back when your computer gives you a Service Battery ⚠ warning, but also for getting Uber to verify you, was $20 for the month of calls and texts, plus $10/GB (no charge beyond 6 GB or $60). I have used 0.43 in just two days since leaving my lazaretto. I had to pay $12.95 for expedited shipping to make sure the card would arrive before I departed.
• Purchase of two washable, re-useable masks for $59.98 that were sent to my sister and have not arrived.
• $8.99/month for Netflix, planned mental sanity account, but never watched more than the first episode of "The West" by Ken Burns and sixteen minutes of the second one

Final Full Day: So Long, My Lazaretto

This is the second post about the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Pauper Insane. 

"Willard Psychiatric Center- 125 Years of Service" says the sign on the back ell.

Site of the first chartered agricultural college in New York, which gets chartered in 1853, opens its doors to promising young farmers in December of 1860, but will basically go defunct as boys marched off to fight for the Union, closes its doors in November 1861. The sprawling campus of what would become the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Pauper Insane includes Hadley House, with a big stage for entertainment, and dozens of buildings--very large and small--that housed the engineer and various other "important" staff, as well as 3,000 or so inmates at a time at its peak. The vast majority of staff lived in the same buildings as the inmates, in case there was any bleating, antics, or need to tie someone to a chair or thrown them in an enclosed metal crib in the middle of the dark, quiet nights here alongside Lake Seneca. This was a humane place compared to what they might have experienced had the New York Legislature, in April 1865, not passed the Willard Act, modeling an institution on the philosophy of Dorothea Dix--some of whose documents used to be part of the collection at this little house museum.

In my earlier post, I speculated that the inmates were a variety of PTSD patients from the Civil and Great Wars, as well as cast-offs from families that could not deal with the syndromes of their children, but it never occurred to me that being gay--a tidbit that my decent docent mentioned in an off-hand way--would have been one qualification for commitment. (An example of my white straight privilege.)

I have shared all of my pictures and my descriptions of what I saw yesterday on a public Facebook post. I have not the time to write a long post today as I must retrieve my letter from Seneca County Department of Health. Also, I have a date with Lucifer and Taughannock Falls, which "is the highest reliable single plunge in the State of New York."

State: New York
Location: Robert H. Treman State Park, 6 miles south west of Ithaca.
Height: 115
Crest: 20?
Water Source: Enfield Creek

Waypoint: 42.40056N 76.58444W

Summary: One of the more impressive falls in the Finger Lakes Region. This one definitely should be part of any waterfall tour of the area. You can hike from the falls through the scenic Enfield Glen to the Lower Falls.

Can't have a Chicken Pox Party, so let's have a Pity Party with your favorite pariah

Coming into Concord on Thursday evening and want to see people on Friday evening in a group setting. Have a message into my friend at the Department of Health to ask where I should lodge, because there are cases of asymptomatic infection, possibly, that extend beyond the 14-day quarantine period. (One friend reminded me that I have actually been cooped up since January 23, with scarcely any possible exposure beyond the buttons in the elevator of my building, but the trip to the airport in a taxi and being on a plane for three hours and then another plane from Beijing to New York resets the Exposure Clock.) I was going to stay in the home of an old, dear friend who has passed away, but I decided that since her child won't be there, it is best not to touch his fridge door or his spare key.  I might obsessively need to wipe everything I touched out of a mixture of politeness and genuine concern. Frankly, as each day wears on, the chances of me being an asymptomatic carrier continue to wane.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun, to have a party with friends since I could get called back to work in China within a week (unlikely, but possible--imagine that level of uncertainty in your life?). Furthermore, I plan to re-quarantine myself for another couple weeks, because as I said to the bickering CDC women at passport control, who could not agree if the professional who was helping me told me that my quarantine was optional, not mandatory, "Don't worry. I am going to quarantine myself anyway, because I do not want to be a part of the spread of a disease or the cause of a pandemic. My friends would never forgive me."

Over the last two weeks, so busy that I have watched the first boring episode of Ken Burns' The West (I am a huge fan of his opus so maybe it is me and not the actual documentary), I have had so many conversations about public health and medicine with a variety of clued-in folks that have left me feeling fairly confident that I know the status of the current knowledge (what we know and what we think we know versus rumors, speculation, and prognostication) and the best way to communicate about what is happening. My old friend, an immunologist, may vehemently disagree with me, but instead of engaging publicly or privately, he has chosen to cut-me-loose, as is the style of Americans on the Internet these days. All I can say is, "Bring it." I love you, but I cannot stand by as people scaremonger about this disease. Scaremonger about Mike Pence and the disaster that our federal government has become, underfunded as it is (blame that on both parties, please, and call your damn Congressman) and run by an Administration that could not find itself out of a paper bag unless there was a tiki torch rally happening at the orifice; indeed, then they would show up with feigned law-and-order to snuff out the torches with a blink and a wink.)

It is good that we can are finally learning more about this. One of the valuable people who has been most helpful to me both in counseling me through this hard time and in providing valid information is a first cousin. She is a former USN doctor, who has served in Guam, but her glibness got us both labeled as insensitive jerks, when she wrote on Facebook, "."

Now she has, in response to my posting an article about how COVID-19 is like the flu, with the comment that the next thing we need is an article about how COVID-19 is like the "common cold," shared this, in the category of what we think we know:

[Eighty percent] of cases thus far are mild, and coronavirus IS one of the ‘common cold’ viruses along with rhinovirus, adenovirus and others while flu -
Orthomyxoviridae - definitely is not. 

In the ‘non-mild’ cases, the pneumonia is the issue with some distinctive findings on chest CT. The literature I’m reading suggests some promise on certain antivirals’ ability to prevent that complication, which seems to show up around day 9-12 of illness (if it’s going to happen).

My physician*, the former head of the NH Medical Society, has also been helpful. One of the bundle of things that repatriating or returning from abroad citizens need to do is sign up for healthcare coverage, if their work coverage is not portable across national borders, as mine was not. He and my cousin were both able coaches for the experience of signing up with a for-profit health exchange. The policy starts today; tomorrow, I am liberated and get a rental car. Good timing. Thank the Lord nothing happened to me in Scranton, where I stopped for dinner on the five hour drive to my lazaretto. You never know when some stranger is going to sneeze on you and give you the flu or a common cold!

Anyway, back to the idea of holding a party. I am worried that I will continue to self-quarantine in an abundance of caution and then get called back to China, seeing neither of my sisters or my favorite people before I need to leave again. My summer vacation is probably getting eaten up by an official March 2 (tomorrow!) restart date so I won't see them until I pop back on a climate-irresponsible junket to attend my sister's wedding in September. Alternatively, I will find a way to get my partner and her kids here and then we will be like one-armed paper hangers in Versailles (or whatever the expression is), as we seek to acculturate and enroll the kids in school--a privilege that my well-heeled Chinese-American friend, a lawyer in Shanghai has availed himself of in Manhattan with his Chinese-American wife and their Chinese-American kids. "I chose Chinatown over Marin for this precise reason. Didn't want to be a scourge...There are three families that here due to the lock out [sic]."

I emailed a few folks about the party idea. Wanted to call it a "chicken pox party" and wear a hazmat suit from an EMT friend who used to visit Superfund sites (a job that I had in 2004). She now mostly visits clothes dryer fires and bonfires (think 5th of November) that have gotten out of control. There will be no party with me in a Hazmat suit and her in a Guy Fawkes mask, though, because somebody I respect blew the whistle on this idea as irresponsible and suggested instead, "Maybe you can have a party to play the game Pandemic, and people can learn and engage around the issues? Bring examples of appropriate behaviors and PPE [personal protective equipment] for flu and droplet-born disease. A hazmat suit may [my emphasis] mis-represent the risks, unless you’re in a medical setting." I think a Hazmat suit would not only protect everybody, but be hilarious. There is no doubt about it, though, it completely misrepresents the risk, just as the picture in this Scientific American article might leave people thinking that there is a basis for aerosol spraying in the streets. Yet, the picture got people to look at the article, just as a person in a Hazmat suit would draw attention, too. In the zeitgeist of the moment, everybody would instantly know what the article was about.


So, I can think of nothing more awkward than sitting around with a bunch of people who do not know each other playing a board game, but I am down with the hand-washing demo and sniffing some pepper so we can sneeze into our elbows (but what if I am sick? Someone else will have to do that.) If you want to join me on Friday evening, please RSVP send me a message. Not sure where I will be staying because NH Dept of Health does not seem to have a COVOD-19 hotline on the weekends that could tell me which public accommodations have agreed to act as quarantine facilities, but, oh yeah, that does not pertain to me any longer.



*A fellow 2004 Boston Democratic National Convention delegate for HoHo "Choo choo" Dean, M.D.--now a pharmaceutical lobbyist since Obama, sadly, gave up on the fifty state strategy and booted him from the position now held by the all-powerful and so-popular Perez, compared, at least, to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, right?

Day Ten: Open Letter for Enemies of Civil Discourse

Day Nine: Letter from Congressman Welch's Office

UPDATE: Phyrrhic victory!!! They have clarified that people should come home and get sick instead of stay and get sick, but all I was seeking was clarity. Come home, friends!


Hello Mr. Lee,

I certainly understand your frustration. I reached out to the State Department with your question, and received the following response:

“Those currently in China should attempt to depart by commercial means. U.S. citizens remaining in China should follow the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Chinese health authorities’ guidance for prevention, signs and symptoms, and treatment. We strongly urge U.S. citizens remaining in China to stay home as much as possible and limit contact with others, including large gatherings.”

Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any additional questions.

Thank you,

Shannon Furnari
Deputy State Director
Office of Congressman Peter Welch (VT-AL)