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A Montreal woman who returned recently from China says Quebec’s health-care system is woefully unprepared to deal with a coronavirus outbreak, and she criticized what she called the province’s slow and lax response to the global public health emergency.

The 50-year-old woman, who immigrated to Quebec more than two decades ago, visited her family for the Chinese New Year but cut short her trip to Tianjin, a city south of Beijing, after the 2019-nCoV virus started spreading through China last month.

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“It would be a miracle if the virus didn’t start spreading in Canada,” said the woman, who decided to quarantine herself upon arrival in Montreal on Jan. 28 — nine days before Quebec’s top public health officer urged people returning from Hubei province to isolate themselves at home.

The woman, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity for fear of a public backlash, had visited relatives far from mainland Hubei, the epicentre of the coronavirus epidemic, where almost 32,000 people have been infected and nearly 1,000 have died.