2/7/20
February brings bone-chilling temperatures to the windswept expanse that surrounds Tyumen, an oil-rich Siberian city 2,100 kilometers east of Moscow. But for 144 Russian travelers, many accustomed to warmer, more westerly climes, it’s home for the next 14 days as they wait in state-ordered quarantine for confirmation that they’re clear of the deadly coronavirus that’s raging across swaths of Asia. On February 5, government-commissioned military jets landed on a snow-covered airstrip in this region carrying the group of passengers evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the growing epidemic in China. Not long after arriving, they were transferred in a fleet of minibuses to a doubly fenced-off sanatorium about 30 kilometers outside the city, for a two-week period of quarantine and medical tests. Russia’s chief medical officer, Anna Popova, insisted that the virus, if detected, would not spread beyond the walls of the sanatorium. Even before they boarded the aircraft in China, many of the passengers took to social media to share details of the journey and what they faced on arrival in Russia. Many were critical of the conditions during the flight.
Marina Zaitseva, a biology student from the Yaroslavl region northeast of Moscow, said in an Instagram post that the group did not know they were going to Tyumen until they had boarded the plane. In a video taken during the 10-hour flight, Zaitseva complained about the noise, the hard benches, and what she said was a lack of seat belts and adequate sanitation. One photograph she posted showed the interior of a cargo plane, with two small camping tents erected, she said, to serve as toilets during the flight. Isolation in the middle of the Siberian winter was one of the more extreme measures the government has taken to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. In social-media posts, many slammed the government for what they saw as a move that put others at risk. "Let them stay there,” one user wrote on Instagram of the evacuees. “Why the hell would we want them spitting out their contagion here?" "They've crawled out like rats from various cities," another person wrote. “What’s the worst thing about the Chinese coronavirus? It’s not the unpaid quarantine for a month, or the canceled flights, or the lack of masks for sale,” she wrote. “The worst is…how people react to a real epidemic.” Last week, Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova said an estimated 600 Russians remained in China’s Hubei Province, which includes Wuhan.
