Stettin native home after coronavirus quarantine

A town of Stettin native who returned Feb. 1 from China said it will be harder for the coronavirus to spread in the United States, where people generally live in their own houses and don’t necessarily confront huge crowds daily, but, if it does, expect that businesses, especially small businesses, will be severely impacted.

Calla Buttke said she and her Chinese husband Jianghan “Nick” Chen were subjected to several weeks of quarantine for coronavirus in their high rise apartment in Henan Province, 200 miles north of Hubei Province, home to the City of Wuhan, which has suffered a major coronavirus outbreak.

Buttke said Henan police and private security guards have enforced a strict mass quarantine, stopping people from going to work, grocery stores or malls. People must wear masks, she said, and be subject to officials using a laser pointer to take people’s temperature. People with a temperature over 102 degrees can be hospitalized.

All of these measures seem to be effective in fighting the disease.

“There were a lot of strict rules, but it seems to be working,” she said. Buttke, who with her husband, run a business that helps Chinese students attend American universities, said commerce in China has ground to a halt.

“Totally everything was closed,” she said. “It was crazy.”

Buttke said the province-wide quarantine has been a hardship on businesses and some have not been able to survive.

“A lot of businesses have bit the dust, a lot of small ones,” she said.

Buttke said she and her husband found themselves in a situation where a business renter they had could not pay the rent because of the quarantine.

Buttke, who never contracted the coronavirus, said sometimes the Chinese government crackdown on movement seemed severe, but, on the other hand, all Chinese have access to health care through universal insurance.

She said the great mass of Chinese live in high rise apartments and frequently go to malls and restaurants to socialize. Chinese life is generally crowded and congested. The conditions are ripe for a disease to spread human to human.

Life in the United States is spread out, she said, and it could prove harder for coronavirus to spread here.

“The lifestyle in central Wisconsin is very different,” Buttke said. “People live in their own homes and they are not constantly together in crowded areas.”