The normally bustling supermarket in Wuhan was deserted, looking more foreign than ever. Khamis Hassan Bakari walked the aisles and saw just two other shoppers, and fear sank in.
"Everybody is scared. Scared of seeing anyone," the 39-year-old Tanzanian doctor said, as authorities around the world scramble to contain the new virus that began in the industrial Chinese city of 11 million.
"You don't even want the supermarket to touch the products you buy."
"For me as a doctor, I know how to cope with the stress," the specialist in nuclear medicine said. "So we have initiated a way of going through this ordeal."
"But that guy, he actually had kidney stones," Bakari said. "We don't have a foreign student here in Wuhan suffering from the virus, we haven't heard of any case."
"This is not the time to be adventurous," Ghana's ambassador to China, Edward Boateng, has warned. "Let's not panic in the process."
Students have reached out to Tanzania's embassy about leaving Wuhan and were told authorities were working on it, Kizwi said. "But I don't expect it."