Watching My Family Confront Coronavirus on Two Continents

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In mid-January, a nurse named Hui Xian Wang heard that four people at a hospital near her own in Huanggang, a city of 7.5 million in Hubei province, had come down with viral pneumonia. The news didn’t seem too worrying. China’s main state broadcaster, CCTV, had reported earlier that month that a novel coronavirus was responsible for similar illnesses in Wuhan, just 50 miles away, but for Hui Xian life was continuing as normal. She had plenty of other things to think about. Her job kept her busy, and she was looking forward to the Lunar New Year holiday, when she’d travel to Anhui province to see her in-laws. Her 8-month-old son was already there, his grandparents delighting in having him all to themselves.

A few days later, it began. Cases of the coronavirus were rising by the hundreds in Wuhan and other parts of Hubei. In Huanggang, patients were arriving faster than nurses could process them, many with severe, hacking coughs and high fevers. On Jan. 23, as the official total of confirmed cases reached more than 800, the Chinese government barred all travel in and out of Wuhan. The train station in Huanggang shut down, along with the bus system. By the end of the month, the whole province of 60 million was all but sealed off from the world.

In Beijing, where I work as a correspondent and anchor for Bloomberg Television, I received Hui Xian’s daily updates with increasing alarm. She’s my first cousin—I’ve known her almost my entire life. Since I moved to China from San Francisco last year, she and I have spoken every few weeks on WeChat, the all-purpose communication app everyone here uses, catching up on each other’s lives and laughing about the antics of her baby and 4-year-old daughter.

Hui Xian wasn’t the only person I had to worry about at the epicenter of the outbreak. My mother grew up in Hubei, and she and my father, who are both chemistry professors, met as students at Wuhan University. Although they emigrated to the U.S. before I was born, we traveled to China every few years when I was growing up, always stopping in Wuhan. I have fond memories of strolling under the blooming cherry blossoms on the university campus, climbing trees and catching butterflies with Hui Xian, and joining her and my other relatives for re gan mian, a local dish of spicy noodles that’s well known all over China.

Like most people, I had no idea that the coronavirus would soon become the most important story in the world, an economy-wrecking juggernaut that would touch me, my parents, and everyone else I cared about.

Hui Xian’s early reports described a situation that was hard to imagine. Her husband and older child were essentially locked in their apartment, along with her father and mother. Their only outside interaction was with members of the neighborhood committee, the lowest level of the government, which was organizing food deliveries to residential buildings.

As a health-care worker, Hui Xian was allowed to leave, but what she found at her hospital was frightening. Basic supplies were scarce, and she had to wear the same mask and gloves for days at a time. Local media reported that some medical staff in Huanggang had resorted to wearing raincoats and garbage bags as gowns and shoe covers. Hui Xian’s biggest fear was that she’d bring the pathogen back with her. “I’m scared,” she told me. “I just take alcohol and spray myself when I get home. I don’t want to infect my family.”

Soon her father, my uncle, began to feel sick, with a dry cough and shortness of breath—signs now known to indicate Covid-19, as the disease caused by coronavirus is called. He started taking large quantities of antibiotics, convinced they would clear up the problem. Hui Xian warned him against going for a test at the hospital, fearing that if he didn’t already have Covid-19 he might contract it there. He went anyway. The results came back negative, and he started to feel better, but he was still paranoid, hyperaware of every little scratch in his throat and constantly wiping down surfaces with disinfectant.

On Feb. 12, Hui Xian moved out of her apartment. To slow the seemingly inexorable spread of the disease—on that day the number of official confirmed cases rose above 50,000—doctors and nurses were being asked to relocate to makeshift isolation units. She’d be living and working in a school dormitory that was also serving as a screening center for patients suspected of being positive. She had mixed feelings about leaving. She already had no idea when she’d be able to see her newborn, who was still with his grandparents in Anhui; saying goodbye to her daughter as well was a depressing thought. But she felt she didn’t have much choice. “Even though in my heart I don’t want to go, it’s my responsibility,” she told me.

The month that followed was the hardest of Hui Xian’s life. The dormitory was one of many temporary quarantine and diagnosis centers that had been set up around Hubei. Before early February, the authorities were largely telling patients with mild symptoms to stay home, an attempt to reduce the strain on overwhelmed hospitals. But the spread of the virus within households prompted a change in strategy, with anyone suspected of being infected sent—whether they wanted to be or not—to facilities like the one where Hui Xian was deployed. Health experts have identified that decision as a turning point in slowing the outbreak in the province.

Hui Xian was part of a team of nurses handling what seemed like an endless flood of patients. Her main job was to monitor their condition, taking temperatures and providing basic care, and to administer lung scans and nucleic acid tests, designed to confirm whether the virus’s genetic material was present. Confirmed cases would be sent on to hospitals. But the test kits were unreliable, and official guidelines at her site required patients to come up negative three times before they could return home. Hui Xian and her colleagues didn’t know who ultimately tested positive. She just saw waves of patients come and go.

She and her team worked 24 hours a day, in shifts lasting at least six hours. The dormitory was cold, and she wore warm winter clothes under a triple-layer jumpsuit that also had a hood to cover her head. Then there were the mask, gloves, goggles, and blue plastic covers for her shoes. Thankfully, supplies were adequate; in the weeks since the outbreak began, auto companies and electronics assemblers, among others, had begun making protective equipment. Hui Xian had no time to eat, drink, or even use the bathroom during shifts, and she learned early on to avoid liquids in the hours before she went on duty. For a while she tried wearing an adult diaper, but she couldn’t get accustomed to peeing while standing up.

One of her jobs was to bring meals and medication to patients, who were each confined to a small room. The task was rarely straightforward. “You never just delivered the food,” she said. People wanted to talk. They wanted, badly, to leave. They were distraught, and in some cases, confused. One elderly woman would call for help in the middle of every night, then get on her knees to beg the nurses to let her go home. The woman’s daughter-in-law was infected, so the whole family had been sent into isolation as a precaution. They were all separated, and the woman had no way to communicate with the others. Hui Xian and her colleagues tried their best to calm her down, bringing extra food and checking in as much as they could, but nothing seemed to work.

“I really don’t know if I can make it,” Hui Xian told me at one point. Walking up steep flights of stairs with bulky packages of food and medicine, weighed down by her protective gear, was “harder than climbing a mountain.” Her mask was strapped on so tightly that it left sharp indentations on her neck, and sometimes her goggles got so foggy that she’d lose her balance. When she inserted IV needles into patients’ hands, she had to feel for their veins with gloved fingers. It was awful, she said, but better than risking getting sick herself.

After each shift, she’d race to the bathroom, shower, and return to her room, which she shared with another nurse. She tried to video chat with her family every day—a luxury people in earlier epidemics didn’t have. Food was delivered to her door. After all, Hui Xian was in quarantine, too.

By early February, Beijing was in a state of suspended animation. Events were canceled, public spaces closed, and everyone who could work from home was told to do so. Instead of a well-equipped studio, I was broadcasting from my cramped apartment. I went for walks occasionally—there didn’t seem to be any risk in that—but the eerie emptiness of the streets made me anxious.

I spoke to my parents in Rhode Island several times a week, calling in the morning or evening to account for the 12-hour time difference. They were following the news from Hubei obsessively, distressed by the stories of overcrowded hospitals and desperate patients. Along with millions of people posting on Chinese social media, they were appalled by the death of Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old doctor in Wuhan who’d tried to warn colleagues that a dangerous virus was spreading, only to be reprimanded by the government for circulating “rumors.”

Shortly after his death, my mother called me, crying hysterically. Another Wuhan doctor, a celebrated geneticist named Hong Ling, had also succumbed. My parents had known him for more than 40 years. Ling’s father was my mother’s favorite professor when she was studying chemistry as an undergraduate, and our families are extremely close, almost like an extended clan. Ling, who was in his mid-50s, spent much of his career in the U.S., but in 2007 he’d moved back to Wuhan, where he worked as a senior professor at a local university, researching rare diseases, and cared for his aging parents.

Ling, I learned, had developed a fever shortly after Lunar New Year. He resisted going to the hospital for as long as he could, hoping to avoid the crowds and long lines. When his fever worsened, he got a CT scan that indicated a coronavirus infection, but hospital beds were limited, and at that time he would have needed a positive nucleic acid test to be assigned one. It took him several days to get tested and another few days to get the results. On Feb. 5, more than a week after he’d first tried to get his diagnosis, he was given a bed at the hospital associated with his university.

His condition worsened. The morning before he left home, his wife shaved his beard so an oxygen mask could fit snugly on his face. He was too weak to do it himself. She wasn’t allowed to accompany him to the hospital, so they communicated on WeChat after he arrived. Not long after, he wrote to say he was feeling much better. His fever had broken, and his oxygen levels were back to normal. But late that evening, the hospital called with devastating news: Ling was dead. His wife rushed there in a daze, begging nurses to let her see her husband one last time. They refused. Government guidelines called for the corpses of Covid-19 victims to be immediately disinfected, sealed in body bags, and sent for cremation. Funerals were banned.

Ling’s death shocked my family more than anything we’d heard about the virus. He was young, healthy, and careful—a scientist who knew exactly what precautions to take to avoid infection. It was now obvious to all of us that what was going on in Hubei was an epidemic that could prove more severe than any in decades. “There’s so much we don’t know about this virus,” my mother said, urging me to stay indoors. “You cannot be too careful.”

Gradually, my parents became concerned that too few people in their adopted country realized what was heading their way. President Trump was downplaying the problem, and the soaring stock market seemed to take no notice. Flights from China had been restricted, but most other travel continued, even as coronavirus cases mounted in South Korea and Italy.

When the virus began spreading in the U.S., my mother wanted to wear a mask, a habit that was becoming second nature for everyone in China. But at the time, government guidelines said Americans needed them only if they were experiencing symptoms, and she worried that putting one on would scare her neighbors and colleagues. “I don’t want people to think I’m the Chinese lady that’s sick,” she told me.

Within a few weeks, things had changed. Coronavirus arrived with full force in the world’s largest economy, spreading first in Washington state and California, and quickly reaching all 50 states. Rhode Island recorded its first case on March 1; the total is now more than 1,200, with 30 deaths so far. Massachusetts, next door, has around 15,000 cases. My mother complained to me about not being able to find masks and hand sanitizer; eventually, she started using alcohol to make her own. She’s still nervous about being exposed, painfully aware that the disease can be serious even for healthy people like her and my dad. When a package arrives, she leaves it outside for a couple of days before bringing it in, reasoning that the virus will have died off by then. She wipes it down anyway, just to be sure.

My parents are now attempting, like millions of Americans, to settle into life under lockdown. The university where they both work has closed its campus, and they’re trying to teach students over Zoom and analyze data from home, though there’s only so much they can do without access to their labs. They’re doing fine, but my Chinese relatives and I still worry about them. For weeks, they called whenever they could to check on us. Now the calls are going the other way.

Life in China has returned to a tentative normalcy. Offices, malls, and restaurants in Beijing have largely reopened, and domestic travel is gradually picking up. It’s not clear, though, exactly what “normal” now means. Wearing a mask and standing at least a meter apart from other people no longer feels strange, and I instinctively slow down when entering buildings to allow a guard to scan my forehead to take my temperature. The smell of disinfectant has become strangely comforting.

Officially, almost no local coronavirus infections are occurring in China, but international experts are skeptical that the outbreak has been halted completely. Only on April 1 did the government begin including people who test positive but don’t have symptoms in its count of the infected, even though that’s standard practice in many countries. There are also persistent questions about the true death toll. According to the government, about 2,500 people in Wuhan died as a result of the virus, but Chinese social media buzzes with rumors that the real number is much higher—in part because of the large stacks of urns reported at funeral homes.

There are no longer substantial restrictions on daily life in most places, but many people are still wary of resuming their old routine. My grandmother lives in Tianjin, halfway across the country from Hubei, with her daughter, another of my cousins, his pregnant wife, and their 2-year-old son. Other than for work or walks around their apartment compound, no one goes outside. They haven’t been to a restaurant or shopped in a store since January. The same is true of my aunt and uncle in Beijing.

Yet I’ve been struck by how calm my Chinese relatives have remained throughout the crisis. The lockdown was undoubtedly harsh, but I heard no complaints. Part of that is certainly a function of history. My grandmother still tells stories of what it was like to live through the Great Leap Forward, when millions starved to death, and of raising my dad during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Sometimes there was so little to eat, she says, that she’d water down a single portion of porridge to serve six people. And my aunt in Beijing, who spent her career in public health, was on the front lines of the SARS crisis in 2003. Back then, she told me, people in the city were so frightened of infection that some parents advised their kids to avoid her daughter.

Hui Xian left her isolation unit on March 9, and after two further weeks of quarantine in a hotel she went back to work at her regular hospital. But aside from the occasional drive to admire Huanggang’s cherry blossoms, she’s staying inside, too. She doesn’t expect to see her baby for another few months; she still thinks he’s safer with her in-laws in Anhui.

I asked Hui Xian how she felt about her experience at the dormitory now that she’d had a chance to process it. I was surprised at how stoic she sounded. “Chinese people can eat bitter,” she said, using a common phrase for enduring hardship. “I feel calm. In the health-care field, you experience so much death and birth. I don’t feel extremely happy or extremely sad.”

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