Chinese in Russia Queue Overnight to Flee! Flights Home Scarce, Disease-Control Supplies Run Out

There are so many Chinese people at Russian customs today. They're all going home. Look at this. Xiaoli says there are still lots of people upstairs. Whenever someone cuts in line up ahead, the Russian officials pull them out. Oh, this crowd! It's so stuffy in here. The video shows a packed border crossing between China and Russia. Chinese residents in Russia are lining up with bags and suitcases, crowding toward the passage back home. Another video posted on Xiaohongshu shows the scene at Russian customs. One user said, "It's getting hard to get home again. The first floor is full of Chinese people returning home. The second floor has Russians heading to China. It looks like things could be pretty tough this year. Tickets for flights from Russia to China are reportedly hard to find. Chinese social media users worry that returning Chinese travelers could spread the outbreak. Some are demanding that authorities round them all up and quarantine them. Having lived through COVID-19, many Chinese fear going through that ordeal again. A Chinese student in Ekskurs, Russia, where a worker at a plague research institute died from unexplained pneumonia, shared news of local lockdowns and said infection control supplies had already run out. Using the screen name Zhao Xianghui, the student posted a video on October 10 with the caption. Don't scare us. We have a week off next week. Some classes have already moved online, and I don't know why. Ekskurs, the site of the suspected pneumonia plague outbreak, is just 620 miles or 1,000 kilometers from China's northern border. A comment under the video read, "Don't trust the news media. Prepare for the worst. Protect yourself and stay alert to the risk." X user Zhao Xianghui posted on October 10. A friend in Ekskursorblast told me the authorities are lying. This is a pneumonic plague. It's an extremely potent modified bioweapon. The whole region has shut down. Masks are sold out. Factories have stopped production and classes have been suspended. My friend asked me to spread the word. They've been suffering through this. Russia's concentration of power makes official information hard to trust. China continues to admit travelers with Russians flying to northeastern China, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, feeling public anxiety. Many people in China are rushing to buy masks and disinfectant. The drug's price rose fivefold in three days. Rumors circulating online suggest plague has spread from Russia to China, with three cases found in Hunan Province. This remains unconfirmed. Authorities may never acknowledge it. Tatyana Shpilova, a 28-year-old researcher at the Siberian and Far Eastern Anti-Plague Research Institute, was admitted to Shilovka District Hospital on September 29 with severe respiratory symptoms. Her condition quickly deteriorated. She was placed on a ventilator and died early on October 2. The most widely circulated account says she accidentally broke a test tube containing bacteria that causes pneumonic plague a few days earlier and became infected. Her mother and colleagues deny this. They said the tube is not made of ordinary glass and would not break so easily in soil laboratory work in closure. The institute also insists there was no laboratory accident. Russian officials gave conflicting accounts and repeatedly changed the story. Early on, some local officials, including the head of the neighboring Republic of Buryatia, said Shpilova may have died of plague. They later stopped mentioning plague and described her illness only as pneumonia of unknown cause. Even within the government, officials appear unable to agree on what happened. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said most reports are false. His statement failed to ease suspicions and instead heightened public anxiety. According to a WHO update released on October 10, Russian authorities tested the deceased researcher and her contacts from multiple pathogens. They conducted more than 5,500 tests and found none of the five pathogens they tested for. Medical monitoring of her contacts also found no cases linked to her. WHO said there is still too little information to establish the exact cause of her illness. It therefore cannot independently determine all possible sources of infection, of particular exposure related to laboratory work. The situation on the ground, however, points in a different direction. As officials insist there is no danger, public doubts in neighboring countries' responses have intensified. Those reactions have bases, while local authorities issue safety assurances. They are also quietly activating the highest level of epidemic alert. Some intensive care wards at Shilovka District Hospital were placed under strict lockdown immediately after her death, with unauthorized people barred from entering or leaving. The institute's offices and laboratories were thoroughly disinfected. Physical barriers were also erected on sites linked to the incident. The scale of the quarantine has added to concern. Within just a few days, local authorities identify about 200 close contacts. They included medical staff who treated her, colleagues at the institute, and family members. All were sent to designated facilities for observation. Russian officials keep saying there is no risk of the disease spreading. Yet local authorities have placed hundreds of people in emergency quarantine and locked down an entire hospital. Public records on Russia's government procurement website, Sakkii, show that local government and public health agencies in at least three Russian regions are skipping standard approval procedures to rush purchases of specialized protective gear for plague. The public health system in Primorsky Krai, some distance from Ekaterinburg, bought 500 reusable Type III plague protection suits in a single purchase. They cost about nine million rubles, about one hundred six thousand U.S. dollars, and were placed directly into the region's strategic emergency stockpile. A clinical facility in the Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, bypassed routine approvals to rush an order for a batch of essential medical kits for plague protection. A large hospital in the Republic of Karelia urgently ordered a large batch of advanced replacement filters for protective suits. News of the gap between public safety assurances and heightened precautions quickly spread across the border through various channels. Neighboring countries grew concerned as they watched Russia's internal response intensify. Mongolia to the south was the first to respond strongly. Its National Center for Zoonotic Diseases issued a notice on October 7, raising health screening levels at all land crossings along the Russia-Mongolia border. The focus was on preventing infections from entering from the north. Mongolia kept its border crossings open, but imposed strict precautions. All checkpoints added health screening staff. Every truck driver and traveler arriving from Russia was individually checked for fever and registered for an epidemiological assessment. Four Central Asian countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—also introduced enhanced health monitoring at border crossings. Their responses were consistent, non-relaxed its precautions because of Russia's official denials. They chose to commit substantial staff and resources to comprehensive screening rather than leave any gaps in entry checks. This is a practical approach when information isn't clear. Screening travelers at the border can keep risks outside the country and avoid costly lockdowns and emergency responses later. Prevention costs far less than dealing with an outbreak after it begins. A bigger concern is how pneumonic plague spreads. It can pass from person to person through respiratory droplets. During the cold, dry fall and winter months, it can spread too quickly for standard containment measures to keep up. Meanwhile, China is preparing to host APEC meetings. Reports say some major meetings may move online, and closed-door talks between leaders may even be canceled. This has brought regional public health and international diplomacy into focus at the same time. Some parts of China have also stepped up public information campaigns on disease prevention. After reports of fatal plague cases in Russia, the Hohhot Research Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Inner Mongolia issued a plague prevention advisory on October 10. The central city said no human plague cases since 1927. Routine monitoring has also found no plague outbreaks among rodents. Its overall assessment is that the current likelihood of plague is low. However, Hohhot is historically a natural plague focus and borders the Russian Far East with frequent cross-border travel. The central virus people arriving from plague affected areas of Russia to monitor their health closely and seek medical care immediately if symptoms appear. The Hohhot CDC said it held an outbreak risk assessment meeting on October 8. Departments responsible for plague prevention, epidemiology, investigations, disinfection, and emergency response attended. They reviewed plague developments inside and outside China and focused on the unexplained pneumonia seen in Russia's Ekropost. The meeting assessed the risk of imported infections from cross-border travel, freight transport, and other movement. It also considered local plague monitoring, seasonal changes, and preliminary findings from the Chinese CDC to evaluate potential public health risks. Hunan CDC, which is far from Russia, published information on plague transmission, symptoms, prevention, and treatment on October 9. Guangdong CDC also released related information the same day. Shops across mainland China and some nearby areas have been rushing to stock up on masks and medicines. According to Hong Kong media, a local mask brand said on social media that its mask sales revenue has suddenly jumped 700 percent. It suggests the increase was linked to people seeing circulating news about plague in Russia. Several specialty mask stores still operate in Shangchao. One female owner said average mask sales revenue at her store had increased by nearly 300 percent since rumors of plague in Russia emerged. After COVID-19, many people still vividly remember the mask shortage. Whenever there are rumors of an outbreak, they buy masks in advance for older relatives and children. A HK01 reporter visited Nanfang Center in Tuen Wan on October 11. A store employee said sales revenue had increased by more than 200 percent on October 9 and 10. One customer bought 17 boxes of masks in a single purchase. The suspected plague incident in Russia has drawn international attention. A former director of US CDC said that if this were ordinary plague, a laboratory worker treated with antibiotics should not have died. He suspects gain-of-function research may be involved. The bacterial strain may have been modified to resist antibiotics, making the situation particularly difficult. People with ordinary plague can survive with prompt treatment, but this outbreak has been severe. US medical experts believe the bacteria may have mutated, or suspected may have been deliberately modified to make them more dangerous. America's scholar Robin Brooks wrote that countries should remember the CCP's concealment of outbreak information before and after COVID-19 emerged. He said authoritarian states cannot be trusted to report outbreaks truthfully. He said he hopes Western governments can learn several lessons from COVID-19. First, authoritarian regimes without checks and balances cannot be relied on to report accurately or protect global public health. In countries such as communist China, power rests with a small elite. He said those rulers show little concern for their own citizens' lives, much less the safety of people elsewhere. Second, when reliable information is lacking, governments should cautiously and decisively suspend flights to and from countries experiencing outbreaks. This cannot eliminate the risk of the situation spiraling out of control, but it can buy time to respond. He also recalled seeing television footage in December twenty nineteen of a CCP government welding shut the exits of some residential buildings to contain the outbreak. Western countries then failed to close their borders in time to slow transmission outbreaks following country after country, and the disease spread worldwide. Discussing the uncertainty over the pneumonic plague in Russia, Brooks said a strange epidemic had emerged there. As expected, Russian authorities were reassuring the world that there was no need to panic. Meanwhile, reports of large scale quarantines and lockdowns appeared contradictory. Russian officials said only that Shipulova had been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin. It did not she died of plague. Health authorities said extensive testing found no link between her illness and pathogens she encountered at work. According to Russian authorities, about sixty percent of Shipulova's identified contacts have been tested. Tests found two COVID nineteen cases and two rhinovirus infections, but no other infectious pathogens. Brooks wrote that just in early days of COVID nineteen, little was known about how the situation was unfolding. He said Western governments top priority should be to suspend flights to and from regions with large numbers of Russian tourists. At the end of his article, Brooks wrote that he sincerely hopes this epidemic turns out to be a false alarm. If the situation is serious, however, he hopes countries learn the lessons of twenty twenty. China and Russia cannot be trusted, and strong quarantine measures must be taken early. Robin Brooks is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He previously served as chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, IIIF, and chief foreign exchange strategist at Goldman Sachs. The widespread panic stems from a lack of transparency and public distrust of Russian authorities that has built up over many years. Alisa Litovkova, a Russian born microbiologist living in Bulgaria, also questioned official transparency. She said that if the highest risk pathogens were involved, standard emergency procedures should include immediate medical care, incident reporting, contact tracing, and preventive antibiotic treatment. She also warned that a negative test does not mean someone is one hundred percent safe. False negatives remain possible. Test accuracy depends on two factors. When samples are collected and the quality. And how they are transported and tested, she stressed that Russian authorities must release more transparent and complete testing data to establish what happened, and address public concerns. Russia has a long history of hiding the truth during crises. Authorities tried to cover up the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but monitoring agencies in Europe and North America detected unusually high radiation levels. They had already concealed an earlier nuclear accident that was smaller but still caused severe damage. There are two key developments to watch. First, whether Russia releases more raw data to give the international community a scientific explanation. Second, when neighboring countries return to routine monitoring at border crossings, these will indicate whether the situation has fully stabilized.