On Jan. 22, Dan Wethli took the city metro to the Revolution of 1911 Museum in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. He noticed something was amiss when security at the front gate took his temperature before he was admitted, an unusual process even for the notoriously watchful Chinese authorities.
Once inside, he found the museum completely empty.
“At first, I thought the news reports and rumors were mostly just exaggerations, just people being cautious.” Mr. Wethli said. “But over the next few days I realized the situation was way more serious than I thought.”
A recent graduate of IUP and resident of Cranberry, Mr. Wethli, 24, was a 2019 recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, granted to students and scholars to research or teach abroad for up to 12 months.
Yet just halfway through, he instead became one of the first Americans evacuated from China for fear of the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak.
He would be subjected to weeks of uncertainty and quarantine, rigorous testing and worry from loved ones. And when all was said and done, he would lose his Fulbright, too.
On Jan. 23, Chinese authorities placed Wuhan under quarantine due to the spread of the new virus. All transportation, including planes, city buses and trains, was immediately halted, effectively preventing anyone from the city of over 11 million from leaving.
Mr. Wethli, one of the hundreds of Americans in Wuhan, was one of them.
Mr. Wethli originally traveled to China in August 2019. Following a four-month intensive language program in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, he traveled to Wuhan to begin his research project: A study on China’s perception of their 1911 revolution.
When he arrived in the city in mid-December, everything appeared normal. Mr. Wethli’s father and sister went to Wuhan for several days to celebrate Christmas. His longtime girlfriend even went to visit shortly after.
Yet, just under the surface, there were rumblings and rumors of an outbreak.
“On Dec. 31, I received a text from another Fulbright researcher that I had met in Harbin,” Mr. Wethli said. “She’d heard word that there were reports of a SARS-like virus spreading in Wuhan. But I was distracted from just moving to a new city and getting all these visitors. I didn’t take it seriously.”
Flash to Jan. 24, Chinese New Years Eve, the first full day of the quarantine, and Wuhan is effectively on lock-down. Like a scene from the film “28 Days Later,” the once bustling city streets are all but abandoned.
The few civilians still outside wore encompassing face masks, made mandatory by the federal Chinese government.
It was that day that Mr. Wethli received a call from the American Embassy in Beijing.
He was told that the U.S. government had decided to evacuate all American citizens in Wuhan as soon as possible, and that Mr. Wethli’s ride, scheduled to leave on Jan. 28, was to be the first to transport some back to the U.S.
“I sat in my dorm for the next few days just glued to my phone for updates,” Mr. Wethli said during an interview Thursday. “I was told that I couldn’t go more than 30 yards from my residence and to start packing immediately with a strict weight limit. Most of my stuff is still in China.”
Early that following Monday, Jan. 27, Mr. Wethli was picked up by staff of the local consulate and taken to a hotel near the Wuhan airport, where nearly 200 other Americans waited to be taken home.
The evacuation was so hastily assembled that the passengers were flown out of China in a near-windowless cargo plane, retrofitted with flimsy airline chairs. Mr. Wethli volunteered to act as a flight attendant, alongside the white-hazmat-suited flight crew.
Along with temperature and symptom checks at the Wuhan airport, their layover stop in Anchorage, Alaska, and their destination airport in Ontario, California, Mr. Wethli and the others were required to wear red wristbands reporting their body temperature during the entire 13-hour flight.
When the plane landed, the passengers were taken to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif. for even further examinations.
Though originally intended to last only three days, a federal quarantine order instead grounded them at the base for two weeks.
“You’d think it’d be boring, but our time at the base really wasn’t that bad,” Mr. Wethli said. “They tested us routinely twice per day, but otherwise we were allowed to socialize. We had boxing, Zumba and art classes. We even had a Superbowl party.”
After two weeks of finding no further evidence that the virus had followed them home, Mr. Wethli and the other Americans were finally released on Tuesday. Mr. Wethli arrived back in Pittsburgh early Wednesday.
Despite the feelings of relief, Mr. Wethli returned to more sobering news: while he and the other Fulbright scholars in China would be considered Fulbright alumni, the remainder of their grant period would be suspended indefinitely.
Mr. Wethli says he is not barred from applying for another Fulbright, but it must be for an entirely different research project.
The organization has also yet to deem when it will allow future scholars to return to China.
Although disappointed that he won’t be able to officially continue his research under Fulbright, Mr. Wethli doesn’t blame anyone for their decisions over the past several weeks. Nor does he think that the people of Wuhan deserve condemnation.
“Once this is over, people still shouldn’t be afraid to go to China or Wuhan. There’s so much it has to offer,” he said. “Whether through Fulbright or not, I fully intend to go back. Academics and really China as a whole have been the themes of my life for the past few years and I plan to continue that trend any way I can.”
First Published: February 14, 2020, 11:30 a.m.
