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Blogger's story from other side of the quarantine fence

By Cui Xiaohuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-16 10:08

It was amusing to see Zhong Shuang juggling an orange, a kiwi fruit and a small sweet melon in her quarantined hotel room on Friday.

"If I knew I could practice an old trick here, I would have saved more oranges" from my lunch, said the marketing chief of a local software firm, her facemask on.

Zhong is among the more than 200 Chinese and overseas passengers quarantined in Guomen Hotel in Beijing's suburbs for fear of having come into contract with two A(H1N1) virus carriers.

Staying in a place where food is served in measures and facemasks are called "particle respirators" is not easy for many people. Overseas visitors often find it difficult to appreciate the Chinese mainland's tight preventive health measures.

But Zhong has found an interesting outlet to keep herself busy. She has taken up blogging in right earnest to tell people how the government was spending hundreds of yuan per day on each "suspected" H1N1 carrier by checking them into star-rated hotels.

Zhong, who was on the flight that the mainland's first confirmed H1N1 patient took, starts her blog by giving minute details on how health authorities, airline officials and police tracked her down.

A "plump astronaut-like" doctor conducted a medical check-up on her on the second day of quarantine, she writes. Skipping ropes have become the most used item by the people in the hotel for work-outs, she says.

Special coverage:  A(H1N1) Influenza Outbreak Related readings:  Government eases flu quarantine plan  Quarantine ends: guests free to go  128 released after quarantine  China lifts quarantine after 7 days One passenger from flu-affected flight kept in quarantine

With attractive photographs taken on her Canon EOS 450D camera and her humorous language, the blog has drawn hundreds of thousands of netizens, many of whom have wanted to know more about quarantine life or encouraged her to keep up her good efforts.

Readers said Zhong's blog, along with those run by other quarantined people, has given them a good idea about the country's disease control mechanism. That may also explain why her blog has registered more than 1 million hits only four days after its debut on Monday.

"Your blog is the best written by those quarantined in China. You got to write a book. It will sell like hot cakes," writes a reader named "lilang911".

"I didn't expect the response from readers to be so great," Zhong told China Daily while updating her fourth day's diary. "I think I will keep blogging discussing how ordinary people see the quarantine measures."

She said she was using this rare opportunity to observe how various State machineries work together to tackle an emergency. "It's difficult to say whether the government is being too cautious I can see it's trying to prevent a worst-case scenario in such a densely populated country," Zhong says in her blog.

Quarantined for nearly a week, she has noticed that even the tightest government preventive measures have limitations.

"We took the same plane as the first confirmed H1N1 patient that's why they were able to track us down. But I guess if we had taken the same subway train with the infected person, it would have been almost impossible to track down any of the co-passengers," she writes.