Students Might Be Released From Quarantine on Friday

Health officials in China will allow a group of high school students from Maryland and the District to be released from quarantine as soon as Friday as long as they show no symptoms of swine flu, a trip organizer said Wednesday.

"They are very excited about it," said Alan Cheung, executive director of the Confucius Institute at Maryland, which organized the two-week Chinese language and cultural immersion trip.

Instead of leaving China on July 30, as scheduled, many of the students decided to stay until Aug. 8 so they can do some sightseeing, he said.

The students were told that the extension will be paid for by Hanban, a cultural outreach program funded by the Chinese government that was already covering costs of the trip other than airfare, Curtis Behre, a junior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, said in a Facebook message.

As soon as the students are released, Behre said, they plan to visit the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Plans to visit Shandong province, which is south of Beijing, were canceled, and the group instead plans to travel to Tianjin, which is closer to the city.

"We did have the opportunity to see parts of the solar eclipse this morning, although there were a few clouds that got in the way," Behre wrote in a message Wednesday.

China has set aggressive policies for tourists exhibiting fever or other flulike symptoms, often quarantining an entire planeload of people if one person aboard tests positive for swine flu.

When the group from Maryland and the District arrived in Beijing last week, one boy had a high fever and later tested positive for the virus. So all of the students were restricted to a school dormitory and then a hotel, Cheung said. Of the 22 students on the trip, nine had been hospitalized with flulike symptoms, and at least three of those tested positive for the H1N1 virus, he said. Neither of the two chaperons had been hospitalized.

"Let me emphasize that quarantine isn't that bad at all," said Behre, who has not been sick and was staying at a hotel with other quarantined students. "The only real 'rules' are to wear masks at all times, take our temperature twice a day, stay within the hotel premises and eat meals in our rooms. Otherwise, we are free to do whatever we please, which, with a creative mind and a positive attitude, can be quite sufficient in quarantine."

Olivia Alonso, who also attends Whitman, wasn't quite as positive. Her Facebook status read: "still in china still in quarantine still alone in my room after 4days still bored as hell still eating rice etc. . . . "