Four quarantines on two continents

Amy Qin, one of our China correspondents, was crowned the Quarantine Queen by her friends after going through four rounds of self-isolation in four cities on both sides of the Pacific. Each offered a window into the different ways governments were grappling with the virus.

Here are excerpts from her Quarantine Dispatch, lightly edited for clarity.

Quarantine #1: San Diego, after arriving on the last State Department-arranged flight to evacuate Americans from Wuhan, China.

Face masks were not required. And though we were confined to one area of a military base, we were still permitted to mingle. After having seen the frenzied rush to procure masks in China, the lax guidelines struck me as odd.

Amy in Wuhan in early February, during the city’s second week in lockdown.  Amy Qin/The New York Times

Quarantine #2: Beijing, after returning to China via South Korea.

The local authorities knew about my Seoul layover and wanted to put me in state-supervised quarantine, possibly at a government site, but I completed this round of self-confinement at home. I only left a few times to walk the dog — always with a mask on.

I never heard back from the authorities. To me, it was China’s response to the epidemic in a nutshell: effective if heavy-handed, and not always fail-safe.

Quarantine #3: Los Angeles, after being expelled along with a number of other American journalists.

The official guidance on masks was all over the place. Testing was in a shambles. Discrimination against Asian-Americans was on the rise. Though I had my temperature checked at Los Angeles International Airport, someone forgot to collect the form that I had filled out with my local contact information and health status. I didn’t realize it until later.

For days, I holed up in a lovely Airbnb cottage in Venice.

Quarantine #4: Taipei, my new reporting base.

After multiple heath checks at the airport, I went straight to my hotel, where I was met outside by a worker in a protective suit, mask and goggles who disinfected my suitcases. He was the last human being I saw for two weeks.

Every day, I reported my temperature to the hotel and my health status to the Taiwanese government. Three times a day, a hotel employee came by to hang a takeout meal on a plastic hook that had been affixed to the door. After two weeks, I was finally released.