Very interesting flu-quarantine diary

Will Weissert, an AP correspondent based in Havana, traveled with his wife to China for a wedding -- and ended up spending a week in quarantine. His account of the quarantine, here and with pictures beginning here, is very interesting on the nuts and bolts of how the system works. It's not a complaint, though there are some complaining details. Mainly a chronicle, with details I hadn't seen elsewhere.

Here is his wife in the quarantine-hotel room, as Chinese officials take notes on her condition.

And here is the intro to his account of how they ended up in this situation:

My wife and I are in perfect health, but after flying to China for my college friend's wedding we're being quarantined in a remote hotel for seven days. The reason: Our flight from our home in Havana included a layover in Cancun, and China is taking no chances with swine flu.

Never mind that we were in Cancun for only two hours, that we didn't leave the airport and that Mexican doctors with electronic thermometers checked us for fever on arrival and departure. Never mind that when our Continental Airlines flight from Newark touched down in Shanghai, we and everyone else on board were not allowed to leave our seats until health workers clamored aboard and pointed a blue beam at our foreheads to take our temperatures.

The Mexican stamps in our passports -- my wife is Chilean, I'm American -- are enough for authorities to pull us out of line at immigration and send us to a medical room where attendants in white lab coats take our temperature yet again and give us surgical masks...

After 3 1/2 hours, a man in uniform -- speaking by phone with a communist official everyone calls "the leader" -- announces we will be confined to a hotel room for seven days.

We say we'll simply fly back home. He tells us that isn't possible.

Worth reading the rest. (Thanks to Daniel Lippman.)

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/05/very-interesting-flu-quarantine-diary/17794/