Connie Wong calls herself a “unicorn,” the rare San Francisco native of her generation who still lives in the city.

Her Hong Kong- and Macao-born parents, now in their 80s, have resided in San Francisco since the 1960s, building careers in the city, retiring in the Sunset District and, until two weeks ago, content to stay here the rest of their days.

But the coronavirus has changed a lot of things in the Bay Area, including a feeling of safety in calling San Francisco home. Like a number of locals, Connie Wong on March 14 made the decision to throw a few things together, get the quickest plane ticket available, and find her way to a country that she feels has achieved more success battling the global pandemic.

“(My mother was) like, ‘I feel like we’re refugees fleeing a war,’” Wong said, during a Wednesday phone call from Taiwan. “And I said, ‘Yes, we are. We are refugees fleeing a biological war right now. Finish packing, we’ve got to go.’”

Leaving the Bay Area is on a lot of minds, as local infection numbers escalate. Reports of local public health supply shortages have emerged, as news from Italy and New York reminds citizens how horrifying it can be for the sick, especially the elderly, when hospitals exceed their capacities. Several Bay Area residents have confirmed they left the country, started a planned trip early or are making plans to leave the U.S. following concerns about care here.

Napa resident Howard Hsu, until recently a bartender at a Japanese restaurant, had a March 31 flight booked to visit his family in Taiwan, on his way to Hawaii. But Hsu was afraid of getting stuck in the Bay Area, where he felt coronavirus preparation and care is inferior. Instead, he quit his job early, quickly gave away some furniture, sold his bicycle and bass guitar, and moved the flight up to March 19.

“I had a gut instinct telling me things are going to get shut down,” Hsu said on Thursday. “There were a lot of outbreaks in the Bay Area. There were talks about the social distance and curfew and ‘shut down the state’ and whatnot. … It was very scary. I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to leave.”

Helen Shaffer of Oakland also left the country early over fears of getting stuck in the United States without reliable health insurance, moving her flight a week earlier to get to the United Kingdom, where she is relocating for work.

“Honestly it feels like I’ve gone out of the frying pan into the fryer a little,” Shaffer said. “Trump’s idea that things can return to normal by mid-April is worrisome, but the government here hasn’t really done a lot to make people stay in.”

The phenomenon seems to be happening across the country. Among higher-profile examples is “Sarong Party Girls” author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, who tweeted on Wednesday night that she was on “the very last plane to Singapore” from New York, for an unscheduled writing retreat. She expressed her relief at landing, and on Thursday started documenting her government-enforced two-week hotel quarantine.

Wong’s journey was filled with drama as well. The 47-year-old Air Force veteran, recovering from breast cancer surgery, hadn’t thought much about the virus before this month — taking a comedy class and performing in a showcase at the Punch Line comedy club in February.

But she followed the news and each day became a little more worried, then scared, then determined to take action. After listening to an episode of the “SF City Insider” podcast on March 12 that offered a grim portrait of a losing coronavirus battle in Italy, Wong says she woke up the next morning, gasping for air, thinking, “holy s—, we have to get out of here!”

Wong bought one-way tickets to Taiwan for herself and parents Howard and Anna Wong, booked a hotel room for $30 a night, and paid for more than $1,000 in travel insurance to help with medical coverage. They left San Francisco for Taiwan on March 16, just as Mayor London Breed ordered residents to stay at home. They just missed a Taiwan order, made while they were in the air, for out-of-country visitors to stay in 14-day quarantines.

“I put 2 and 2 together,” said Wong. “If my parents get hit, if I take them to the E.R. in San Francisco, they will not get a ventilator, because it will be wartime protocol. There are not enough nurses. There are not enough doctors. There are not enough ventilators.”

With extensive testing and quarantines, Taiwan had just 252 reported cases as of March 24, and two reported deaths, with a population of about 26 million. In the same time period, the San Francisco Bay Area had more than 25 deaths with about a third of the population, and numbers rising.

C. Jason Wang, a Stanford professor who has studied Taiwan’s COVID-19 response, co-wrote in a recent paper that Taiwan learned from its experience battling SARS in 2003, and had the training, experience, resources and technology to take on the emerging outbreak of coronavirus.

He said the flight of U.S. residents to Taiwan is “happening a lot,” but the days of easy travel to Taiwan are over.

“(Most) of Taiwan’s recent COVID-19 cases are imported from the U.S. and Europe by people seeking refuge in Taiwan,” Wang wrote in an email response to The Chronicle. “This is placing a strain on Taiwan’s health system. Recently, Taiwan placed a 14-day mandatory quarantine for people coming from ‘hot spots’ in the U.S. and Europe; stopped issuing visas, and (is) allowing only Taiwan citizens to enter (with 14 days quarantine).”

Wong and her parents are in Taiwan on a 90-day visa, but she hopes her parents can stay for at least six months. Wong’s father went to the Republic of China Military Academy in Taiwan as a teen, with a Taiwanese passport.

Wong recently moved to a $9-per-day hostel to save money. She only ventures outside when she has to, fills out a daily checklist monitoring her health for the government and says her temperature is taken everywhere she goes.

Her parents are mostly settled in their hotel, ordering from delivery service Foodpanda, the Taiwanese version of Uber Eats.

“These people do not play. These people are totally all over you ... in a good way,” Wong said of Taiwanese government oversight, which she used to criticize as too stringent. “That’s why their numbers are so low. They actually do tracing. They learned from the SARS outbreak. If you’re sick, they’re like, ‘Who did you come in contact with?’ And if you’re in contact, that person also has to go in quarantine.’”

Hsu said he has residency in Taiwan but still is in 14-day quarantine.

He plans to stay in Taiwan until the crisis is over, before moving on to Hawaii as planned. He said the country has been taking the virus seriously for months and hasn’t wavered like the United States. When he visited Taiwan in late January, they were already taking temperatures at the airport.

“It’s not like the U.S., where they were just letting everyone come in, and not doing any quarantine measures,” Hsu said. “I feel like it’s very safe here. ... They have people calling me twice a day to see if I’m feeling all right. … They have a news conference every day, and they talk about how people are infected — they have all the details.”

Both Wong and Hsu said they struggled over whether their initial choice was correct but haven’t regretted it.

“It’s a rash decision, and I don’t like making impulsive, rash decisions,” Wong said. “It usually makes you spend more money. It makes you off-center. It’s not a comfortable place to be. But I’m super thankful now, especially reading all the news.”

Wong has a teenage daughter back in the Bay Area who she said chose not to go to Taiwan. Wong said she planned to spend the rest of the day looking for masks and disinfecting wipes, to send back to family in the States.

“This is how f—ed up it is,” Wong said. “I’m sending you guys back home masks and antibacterial hand wipes. America is the most powerful, richest, affluent f—ing country. And you guys don’t have enough masks and hand wipes.”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub