From a scare in Shanghai to a quarantine in Georgia

Before traveling to China in late January, Holly Bik and her husband watched countless news reports and read as much as they could about the novel coronavirus, which had been detected in the country a few weeks earlier. After weighing the odds, the couple went ahead with their travel plans. Things would be fine, they figured. They weren’t going to the heart of the outbreak.

“It wasn’t until we actually had gotten to China that everything blew up in the media, and . . . the scale of the problem really became apparent,” recalled Bik.