Students ready for release from China quarantine
WEST PALM BEACH (AP) – An accountant and nine students from South Florida were set to be released from swine flu quarantines in China.
John Yeend, 46, spent five days in quarantine in a Chinese hospital after testing positive for the swine flu virus. He said he expects to return to South Florida on Monday night.
He arrived in China on June 5 for a vacation, but came down with a fever three days later. He went to a hospital and, though initially sent back to his hotel in Qufu, officials whisked him into quarantine in the middle of the night after telling him that “his test was bad,” his wife said from the couple’s West Palm Beach home.
Yeend said he has spent his time studying Chinese, and he sympathizes with the two friends traveling with him who will be quarantined until Monday.
“They’re all in quarantine as a result and they’re not very happy,” he said Saturday by phone from his hotel room. “I’m getting out before them.”
In an unrelated case, nine students and a chaperone were quarantined in a Beijing hotel because a nearby passenger on their flight to China disembarked the plane with an elevated temperature.
Although the air conditioning was shut down in their quarantined hotel to prevent any germs from circulating, the students were given movies, pizza, Internet access and large water guns to play with in their confinement, said Darien Morrison, a 16-year-old student at the College Academy at Broward College.
“It’s really not bad at all. Parents make it seem like it’s horrible,” Morrison wrote in an e-mail.
Chinese officials told the students they would be released from the hotel Monday morning, Micayla Moffat, of Cardinal Gibbons High School in Fort Lauderdale, wrote in an e-mail.
The students were on a trip organized by the People to People Student Ambassador Program. Eleven other students and two teachers from South Florida were also on the trip but were not quarantined.
The students who were quarantined said they would be allowed to continue their travels or return to the U.S. earlier than they had planned.
China has been quarantining people exposed to the virus, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was released Thursday.