Over 1,000 Americans were evacuated from China due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The group just finished the mandatory 14-day quarantine.
The wish of Esther Tebeka, one of the evacuees, to continue her life had to people refuse to come near her or cover their faces with surgical masks due to unfounded fears.
“How many times can I tell people I’m not sick?” said Tebeka in a Reuters report.
Agence France Presse reported that Ukrainian evacuees have to deal with people gathered outside a hospital protesting government plans to set up a quarantine in the medical facility.
In order to bring Ukrainians evacuated from #Wuhan to quarantine in the medical center in Novy Sanzhary, the authorities have to use the National Guard and armored vehicles. Locals protest, block roads fearing the spread of the #coronavirus” #Ukraine
— nonouzi (@Gerrrty) February 20, 2020
The Interior Ministry said all evacuees would be kept for two weeks at the Novi Sanzhary Medical Facility in the Poltava region.
The protesters set up bonfires and broke the windows of some buses. Authorities had to heighten security measures, deploy hundreds of armed police and an armored personnel carrier to keep the peace in the area
Ukraine has no COVID-19 patients, as of posting time.
Other than evacuated passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, there are only 15 U.S. cases of coronavirus. Only two people were infected through person-to-person transmission after return. There are no deaths reported in the US.
Cindy Kam, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said the roots of coronavirus discrimination seem to come from people’s instinctual, “visceral disgust” of infectious diseases, rather than scientific fact or racial prejudice.
Kam, who studied Ebola and Zika outbreaks, found that people’s fear of the diseases outweighed concerns over who might carry them.
The novel coronavirus has killed more than 2,000 people and infected over 74,000 in China and hundreds more in over 25 countries.
