Boulder graduate student Thomas Spradling was two days into a trip to study the Beijing art scene when his plans were abruptly interrupted by Chinese authorities dressed in white biohazard suits.
Now, the University of Colorado student is quarantined in what he describes as a sweltering, decrepit hotel where the food is “mostly gristle” and the beds are “solid as a rock.”
He and his mother, Barbara Spradling, were rounded up two days after arriving in Beijing, forced to leave their four-star hotel and driven, sirens blazing, to a quarantine hotel.
The pair were among between 100 and 200 travelers stuck in the hotel — the latest international travelers held in China because of the swine-flu scare. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin spent about four days in a Shanghai hotel earlier this month after a flight from Newark, N.J.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta began warning travelers last month that they might end up quarantined overseas if someone on their flight is suspected of having swine flu.
Chinese authorities kept dozens of Mexicans under quarantine soon after the swine-flu epidemic began in Mexico and have been screening air passengers who arrive from the U.S.
Spradling, 25, said Chinese health officials took infrared temperature readings from the foreheads of all the passengers on his flight. He and his mother were cleared and spent the next two days exploring the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.
Men in biohazard suits showed up at Spradling’s hotel at about 11 p.m. Monday. He and his mother were forced to put on masks, had their throats swabbed and had to list everyone they had been in contact with in Beijing.
At the quarantine hotel, which Sprad ling said was “eerie” and abandoned by staff, health officials take two daily temperature checks — at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.
An official at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, working through a translator, found out that Chinese authorities intend to keep Spradling and the other passengers until Saturday, he said.
“There’s a lot of frustration due to the fact that many have lost five to seven days of their vacation to China, and for some, that was the majority of their time here,” e-mailed Spradling, who is keeping busy sending feeds to the social-networking site Twitter from his hotel room.
“I feel that in order for these ‘imprisonments’ to stop, people in America should be more aware of the miserable conditions Americans are enduring without actually having any symptoms of the illness,” he wrote. “We are guilty until proven innocent.”
After her release, Barbara Spradling will have one more day to see Beijing before flying back to the States. Thom as Spradling, though, still plans to study contemporary art in Beijing before heading to Tokyo to check out Asian art history.
