Boheng and Lenka Return Home

Our graduate student Boheng has returned to China to resume his PhD program at Peking University. Meanwhile, Lenka has completed her postdoc in the lab and has returned to Czechia, where she is on maternity leave. Afterwards, she will be looking for job openings there. Best wishes to you both, Boheng and Lenka!

Boheng Liu Lenka Vyklicka

 

Boheng also describes the COVID-19 response he encountered on his way home:

Lastly, about the quarantine process that I went through. I got back to China on Sept 13rd at Shanghai PVG international terminal. The whole airport had been redesigned into a big maze which you can only go in one direction. There were checkpoints along the road where you need to sign up and provide your information including where you came from, what’s your plan here in China, do you have any of the symptoms in the last 2 weeks, and your seat on the plane, etc. All the staff there were wearing fully covered BSL-3 protective suits. And after that, every one of us took a COVID-19 test, which hurts a lot. They put the cotton tip all the way through your nose to make sure they got the sample. When we finished all those, which took almost 2 hours, there were busses outside waiting to take us to the quarantine hotels. 

You might be quite familiar with the rest of the story. I stayed in that tiny hotel room for the entire two weeks, with my body temperature taken twice a day. I was not allowed to leave the room or order take-out. The food was left on a shelf in front of my door every day. I was lucky that none of the people on my plane was diagnosed positive for COVID so I can leave on time. I got one last COVID test the day before I left (cotton tip all the way down to the throat this time). When I was checking out, I got the result for my last two tests and one piece of paper proving that I was “all clear”. I got back to Beijing the next day. And since I came back from another city this time, I stayed in home-quarantine for another two weeks.