'Scared and Panicked': Travelers Rush to Avoid Virus Quarantine

“It feels like trying to leave Paris in 1940 or something — there’s a bit of panic settling in,” said Jeffrey Phillips, 41, who was unsure when his wife, Sue, would be able to return to the United States after a trip to visit her family in China.

Under new federal rules that apply to U.S.-bound flights that take off after 5 p.m. ET, U.S. citizens who have been in China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the epidemic, in the last 14 days will be subject to a quarantine of up to two weeks. Military bases said they were expecting to house about 1,000 such “evacuees.”

Other U.S. citizens who have visited mainland China will undergo a health screening and can be ordered to quarantine in their homes for up to 14 days, according to the Homeland Security Department.

Waiting for a flight to arrive in San Francisco on Sunday before the new restrictions took effect, Jancey Gui, a student from China, said she and her friends exchanged frenzied messages after the United States announced the cutoff.

“I was extremely scared and panicked,” she said. Gui rushed to change a ticket for her mother, who arrived on Sunday from the Chinese city of Xian.

Under the restrictions announced by the Trump administration on Friday, foreign nationals who have been in China in the last two weeks will “generally” be denied entry into the United States. Federal officials said the rules were necessary to minimize the risk of the disease spreading further in the United States, where nine cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed so far, including one in the San Francisco area on Sunday.

“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” President Donald Trump said in an interview taped Saturday with Fox News personality Sean Hannity to air before the Super Bowl. “But we can’t have thousands of people coming in who may have this problem, the coronavirus.”

The number of lab-confirmed cases of the coronavirus stood at around 14,000 worldwide on Sunday, with over 300 reported deaths, all but one of them in China. A number of scientists now fear that the virus will become a pandemic — an ongoing epidemic on two or more continents, with potentially painful effects on health, travel and global commerce.

All U.S. citizens who have traveled in China within 14 days of their arrival home to the United States will be directed to one of 11 major airports in New York; Newark, New Jersey; Chicago; Detroit; Dallas; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Seattle; Honolulu; Atlanta or outside Washington.

Jeffrey Phillips, who is from the St. Louis area, scrambled on Friday when several major airlines announced that they were halting flights out of China for weeks. His wife’s flight on American Airlines for Tuesday was canceled.

“We might be separated for months,” he said. “We don’t know how bad this virus is going to get.”

For now, the family has a hopeful backup plan: Sue Phillips, 37, an American citizen, is booked through another airline on Monday on a flight to Korea, where she can then connect to a flight to Los Angeles and then to St. Louis.

“What I’m worried about now is, every day there’s more cancellations, more countries sealing off their borders,” Jeffrey Phillips said.

Passengers arriving at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday described a scramble to leave China. Richard Ren, a businessman who flew from Beijing, said he paid $2,000 to move his flight up by a day and make the deadline.

“It was extremely tense,” Ren said in Mandarin. Like most passengers, he wore a mask as he walked through the arrivals hall and described an Air China flight across the Pacific where passengers used copious hand sanitizer, all the flight attendants wore masks, and passengers were deliberately seated with empty seats between them.

Ren and others arriving in San Francisco said they were not screened for symptoms when they arrived. But they described many screenings in China before their departure.

Americans whose flights left after the 5 p.m. cutoff, and who had spent time in Hubei province, would be housed at one of four military bases for up to 14 days, the Defense Department said: Fort Carson in Colorado, Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco, Lackland Air Force Base in Texas or Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego.

Each of the bases set up for quarantine have extensive, hotel-style quarters, the military said.

About 200 Americans are currently quarantined at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, after arriving Wednesday on a State Department-chartered flight from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, federal health officials set up screening areas for arriving passengers, said Elise Durham, an airport spokeswoman. But the airport’s direct flight to and from China, a Delta flight to Shanghai, was suspended on Saturday, she said.

Since the United States announced the travel restrictions on Friday, a number of other countries, including Japan and Australia, have followed with their own.

“A lot of us airlines are trying to figure that out, candidly,” said Lisa Hellerstedt, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, which is halting all fights from China after Sunday.

A number of travelers were critical of the Trump administration’s restrictions, which they described as rushed.

“The deadline was too sudden, it ruined all our plans,” said Kevin Luo, a passenger who traveled from China via Hong Kong and arrived in San Francisco on Sunday.

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Amber Gao, also arriving in San Francisco, described a “fight” for the remaining tickets to the United States over the weekend.

“Every family member was on a computer trying to load tickets,” she said. “It was nerve-wracking, because every time you loaded a new page, the ticket would disappear.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .