An Interview With Indian Student Stuck In Wuhan

Brut India

Cooped up in her room in Wuhan, Monica Sethuraman says she could run out of supplies in two weeks if things don’t improve in China. The PhD student spoke to Brut India about being caught at the centre of the deadly Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.

Transcript

00:00Namaste India, I'm Monika Sridharaman from Wuhan. Wuhan is home to 500 Indian students

00:06and of which 173 are stranded right now here.

00:30What if the person who is outside is just coughing and sneezing and just put their hands

00:37out there, we see people collapsing. So we don't want, when we see videos of people collapsing

00:42just like that because of lack of oxygen, we have fear. The fear is in our heads that

00:50on January 14th we were travelling, we used to, we used just mask and we were travelling

00:56but now we realise that even mask will not protect us. So we have a fear to, you know,

01:03take extreme precautionary measures as to confine ourselves in our rooms so we will

01:07stay protected. That's what we are doing and almost 173 Indians are just confining

01:14ourselves to restricted rooms.

01:26We have bought groceries for two weeks and we hope that in two weeks some, some

01:55resolution or some solution will come so you can go out and buy some more groceries because

02:00as of now there is no tomatoes outside and the groceries are very limited because of

02:05the transport lockdown. There is no movement of goods from one place to another so this

02:09is being very hard on us. Imagine if I want to go to Walmart, if I have to go buy something

02:16from a state-owned, a state-owned supermarket, it's quite far and I am fearful of going out

02:23because the virus is very contagious.

02:30Government and the university officials have given us thermometers, hand washers, sanitizers

02:36and masks. Even though there were travel advisories and the mayor advising people to not travel,

02:44people kept moving because it's the time of the year that they go visit their families and

02:50spend some time with their families, parents, grandparents. So they couldn't stop the movement

02:55of the people so we ended up having a lockdown, complete lockdown.

03:20It's very sad during a period of Chinese Spring Festival and Lunar New Year that such a disease

03:28have, comes as a shocking news, such a disease have almost handicapped us from moving especially

03:35the Chinese. Such a lockdown is very unfortunate.

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