Wuhan residents on how to make the most of your quarantine

Featured in Quartz
May 1, 2020

In mid-April, a week after Wuhan emerged from more than two months in quarantine, a friend of mine in Wuhan sent me a WeChat message: “Don’t waste your quarantine,” she said. “We are all realizing now how unique a time it was in our lives.”

The week before I received this message, my friend Alicia Cheng wrote to ask if I needed some surgical masks in New York. The question gave me pause. Why, exactly? Just three weeks prior, I had shipped masks to her and to other friends throughout China.

How could the world have changed so much, so fast? By then, Alicia and her neighbors were emerging after more than 60 days of hard lockdown, as Americans were just getting settled into theirs.

There is a lot we can learn from people in China—not the government, not the macro-economy, but the people—who had to stave off the novel coronavirus before us.