Volunteers drop cars and deliver groceries to help travellers from China self-quarantine
Credit to Author: Joanne Lee-Young| Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2020 03:08:49 +0000
The messaging app WeChat is connecting travellers arriving in Metro from China with volunteers willing to drop cars off at the airport and deliver groceries to their homes, so the travellers can quarantine themselves for two weeks.
It’s a grassroots action based on two weeks being considered the maximum incubation period for the deadly coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China.
“I just want to offer my help, rather than people feeling like they have to get into a taxi,” said Frank Kong, a local photographer who joined a WeChat group started at the beginning of the week.
He explained how it matched him up with a family that also lives in Burnaby. “I met the wife and drove their car and dropped it off to her husband at the airport.”
He was coming in from Shanghai. “I saw him from a distance. He knew his car. I waved bye,” said Kong.
He then got a ride home from the airport by another driver, also connected to him by the WeChat group.
On Friday, he was back at the airport to do another car drop-off, this time for a passenger arriving from another city in mainland China via Hong Kong.
There are various groups popping up on WeChat.
Li Li, a teacher who lives in Vancouver and uses the WeChat handle lilyxmca, started the one that matched Kong.
It started when she saw a petition on WeChat calling on the Canadian government to ban all flights from China to Canada.
It had been signed by thousands of people, including many people with Chinese Canadian names, but Li, who moved to Vancouver from Xiamen in China’s eastern Fujian province 13 years ago, didn’t like the idea.
“I thought, why cut off people who live here?”
But she, too, is worried about the continuing spread of the coronavirus. She had some more elaborate ideas, but friends convinced her to start with a simple offer to drop off cars and deliver groceries so travellers could more easily avoid public spaces such as taxis, transit, supermarkets and malls.
There was an immediate response and Li said there are about 50 “helpers” across Metro Vancouver that she has now divided into mini-groups for different areas with team leaders to coordinate matches.
On Thursday, Canadian health officials asked anyone arriving in Canada from Hubei province, which surrounds Wuhan and is the centre of the outbreak in China, to voluntarily observe a 14 day quarantine even if they have no symptoms. But many travellers to Vancouver from China had already been doing that, perhaps on the advice issued Jan. 28 by China’s embassy in Canada.
Li said even before Ottawa escalated its response this week, she had received more than 100 requests for help as families deal with travellers returning from “all over China. Guangzhou. Beijing. Shanghai. Hong Kong.”
On Friday night, volunteers dropped off cars for two families with members returning from Hunan province in central China and Sichuan province in the southwest.
Canada has not suspended flights from China, but the federal government is advising against all non-essential travel to China and telling any Canadians in China to leave using commercial flights as soon as possible.
By contrast, “at least 14 countries and territories, from the U.S. to India to Hong Kong have now introduced some form of China-related travel restrictions as policy-makers try to contain the spread of a virus that has killed more than 560 people and infected nearly 30,000,” according to Bloomberg.
“China has really praised Canada, and most Chinese (Canadian) people here felt so good (to see that). The media (in China) has really used it,” said Elaine Wang, a parent of two young children who lives in Vancouver. “But the feelings are complicated.”
Wang lived in Shanghai during the outbreak of SARS in 2003. Like Kong and others who are getting involved by driving, delivering or just circulating calls for volunteers, she said going through that experience in China or Hong Kong motivated her to take responsibility.
“We know it will get worse. We are not shocked. To someone else, it might just be numbers. But to us, (we know) doing one thing can change what happens, change destiny. We want to do meaningful things.”
jlee-young@postmedia.com