Her daughter took her first steps in quarantine: A Wisconsin mom tells story of time in Wuhan
NEENAH - Like many little girls just shy of their first birthday, Adalynn Roth is learning how to walk.
The difference between her first steps and the steps of so many others, though, is that she took them thousands of miles away from her house in Neenah, quarantined along with her mother and sister on a California military base after being evacuated from Wuhan during the thick of the city’s deadly coronavirus outbreak.
Late Sunday night marked a happy return home for the Roth family after more than a month apart — Adalynn’s mother, Daisy Roth, 10-month-old Adalynn and 5-year-old Abigail had flown to Wuhan to visit family in January, ending up trapped there as the city locked down in hopes of preventing the virus’s spread.
Daisy’s husband, Sam, was left in Neenah sharing his story and calling his congresspeople to attempt to bring his family home.
After the lockdown, Daisy and her daughters stayed in her parents’ apartment. She only left twice to pick up groceries, she said. Her first outing was unexceptional, but on the second, a sign next to the elevator in the apartment building instructed her to grab a tissue to press the button, not to touch it with her bare hand.
Despite the global apprehension starting to spread about the disease, Daisy said she felt relatively safe in Wuhan. She hoped the baby wouldn’t catch a cold that would send them to the hospital among the coronavzirus patients, but still, she reasoned that if they stayed inside, they’d be all right.
That changed when she received notice that her family could get on a chartered flight out of the city leaving Feb. 4. The road to the airport, she knew, could be tough — the Chinese government had set up strict military checkpoints to guard against people wandering too far from their districts.
“I called a lot of people there, for the whole day,” she recalled. “Nobody could give me details about the checkpoints, and what I could expect
there.”
She made it through two checkpoints and to the airport, where flight passengers had their temperatures checked and were given new masks before boarding. She covered Adalynn’s car seat with blankets.
The flight was quiet. One child had had a fever, was separated to a closedoff part of the plane and later tested negative for the virus. Daisy briefly thought it strange that no one let out a single cough.
“Later, after two weeks in quarantine, I talked to them,” she said, laughing. “They said, ‘Oh, we used cough drops.’ ”
After landing on U.S. soil, the Roths and their fellow passengers were transported to Travis Air Force Base to begin quarantine for 14 days, the time scientists estimate it takes for symptoms of the coronavirus to arise in a patient.
Besides the fact that they needed to wear masks and get their temperatures checked twice daily, they had a comfortable stay, Daisy said. She took tai chi and kickboxing classes, and Abigail joined the other eight or nine children in games of soccer and “Zombies,” an imaginative version of tag.
Once their 14 days were up, Sam met his family in California and they spent a few days there before returning home, where they’ve slowly adjusted back to normal life, filled with grocery shopping, making dinner and the usual hustle and bustle that comes with having two small children.
Tuesday marked Abigail’s first day back at Fox River Academy in Appleton, where Daisy said she was welcomed back with a hug from her teacher and to the delight of her friends, who had missed her.
Through the monthlong ordeal, Daisy said the hardest part was choosing to leave Wuhan. It was the right thing to do, she said, to get her kids out of there.
“But my parents are still there. All my relatives are there,” she said. “It was a hard decision to make.”
She speaks with them every other day, trying not to ask too many questions to avoid making them feel on edge.
Of more than 80,000 cases worldwide according to the World Health Organization’s
Tuesday totals, nearly 65,000 were in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. Nearly 2,600 people had died there.
For now, the Roths will return to business as usual — the last minute of their 15 minutes of fame, Sam joked, after their story made network and cable TV news.
The three of them are healthy, and not feeling as though they’re treated any differently because they’d been through isolation and quarantine. In fact, Daisy said on the flight back from Chicago to Appleton, a man recognized them and shared some goodwill.
“He was like, ‘I feel so happy for you,’ ” she said. “It was nice.”