University of Oregon senior Carol Kress was in Shanghai, China, when she learned she had one week before she needed to leave the country.
She was staying in Shanghai as part of the UO Chinese Flagship Program, but in light of the concern surrounding the rapidly emerging cases of the Novel Coronavirus in the country, the university decided to put a temporary halt to the internship.
Once she returned to China on Jan. 26 after visiting Japan during a break period, Kress said she was “obsessively checking the news,” but she has refrained from doing so since booking her flight to the United States.
“I’ve been purposely avoiding any news about it, so I don’t know what the numbers are right now,” Kress said. “Because there’s nothing I can do about it and just looking at the numbers, that it’s just going to, like, drive me insane.”
The virus was first discovered in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China in December 2019, with many early patients being traced to the same seafood and live animal market, according to the Centers for Disease Control. There have been increasingly more patients without exposure to animal markets, which CDC said indicates transmission from person to person.
As of Feb. 2, the World Health Organization reported 14,557 total confirmed cases, with 146 being outside of China spanning 23 countries. The WHO stated that 305 patients have died as a result of the coronavirus.
Though no cases of the virus have been reported in Oregon, the University of Oregon stated in an email to students last week, faculty and staff that it is taking steps to reduce the virus’s potential risk on campus, including suspending official travel to China and suspending all UO study abroad programs in China until further notice.
A UO representative said in the event of a hypothetical case on campus, the UO Health Center would abide by the CDC’s screening procedure for the coronavirus.
Richard Liao, a UO senior from China, recently visited Hong Kong and planned on attending his cousin’s wedding, but it was called off due to concerns about coronavirus.
Liao returned to Eugene on Jan. 29 and elected on his own to stay indoors for about a week. He said he wanted to avoid contact with classmates in case he has been affected by the virus but has not shown symptoms, which he called “being responsible.”
“I just do it on my own because they recommend that people from Wuhan to do that,” Liao said, though he did not travel to Wuhan. “I just don’t want to take any risk.”
Virus patients have varied from having “little to no symptoms” to “being severely ill and dying,” CDC reported. Symptoms associated with the virus can include fever, cough and shortness of breath.
CDC stated that it believes the symptoms of the virus will appear between two and 14 days after exposure, citing the incubation period of the MERS virus, another type of coronavirus.
While she was in Shanghai, Kress said she only left her apartment once to go to a grocery store and described what she saw as “bizarre” and almost “post-apocalyptic.”
“The anxiety was palpable with the people in the grocery store,” she said. “People shoving each other out of the way to get, like, frozen dumplings.”
Jordan Luo, a UO sophomore from Shenzhen, China, said he remembers thinking, “This is not a big deal,” when he first heard of the coronavirus on Dec. 28. But Luo said he became more worried as the virus spread, and he texts his parents every day, reminding them to “wash your hand and wear the mask, don’t go outside and go to the market, don’t meet people that you don’t know, even the people you know, just get away from the people.”
Much about how coronavirus spreads is still unknown, the CDC said, and “current knowledge is largely based on what is known about similar coronaviruses,” such as MERS and SARS.
Person-to-person transmission usually “happens among close contacts” — within about six feet — when an infected person coughs or sneezes and respiratory droplets enter another person’s mouth, nose or lungs, CDC said.
The UO Chinese Students and Scholars Association is collecting donations, which CSSA President Andy Zhou said will go toward funding medical supplies for hospitals in China.
