Passengers arriving on last flights from Hong Kong happy to be in Boston amid coronavirus concerns

BOSTON — The coronavirus is now an American public health emergency. Starting at 5 p.m. Sunday, no flights from China will be allowed to land at Logan Airport in Boston.

On Friday, passengers arrived on the final flights from Hong Kong before the travel restrictions begin.

James Wolfgang’s wife went to China for the lunar new year on a round-trip flight on United and was supposed to come back in March.

He’s glad she came back now.

“That’s what I told her. The government is shutting everything down so we have to book the flights now,” he said.

Americans returning from Hubei province, which has been the heart of this outbreak, will be required to undergo a mandatory two weeks of quarantine.

Passengers flying from other parts of China will be allowed to monitor their own health conditions.

In the case of Wolfgang and his wife, they decided she’ll sleep upstairs while he sleeps downstairs.

“We have a two-story house, this was her idea,” James Wolfgang said.

Boston 25 News also spoke to passengers coming off a flight from Beijing Friday afternoon, many of them local college students.

They said they weren’t too concerned with the spread of the disease because Beijing is so far away from Hubei province, but they say everyone on the flight and in the airport in China wore a mask for their own safety and others.

“You don’t know whether you’re carrying the virus or not and you don’t want to give it to other people. So everybody’s wearing the mask,” said Haru Huant, a UMass Boston student returning from China.

They were also thoroughly screened before boarding the plane.

Passengers who are allowed into the country from China will have to enter the U.S. through one of these seven airports: JFK, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Honolulu.There will only be a few more flights to Boston this weekend from Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong, but after Sunday the closest someone could fly from China will be to JFK Airport in New York.

And then they would have to figure how to get from New York to Boston.

As part of the public health emergency, Health and Human Services announced President Donald Trump will temporarily ban entry to U.S. foreign nationals believed to be a risk of transmitting the coronavirus beginning on Sunday.

© 2020 Cox Media Group