A California man who self-quarantined after returning home from China amid the coronavirus outbreak said he is '100x more concerned' for his health in the US than he was in China LinkedIn icon The word "in". Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email.

The New York Stock Exchange. JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images A Bay Area resident visited Kunming, in China's Yunnan province — about 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak originated — on January 25.

He said that he saw more safety precautions being taken in China than in the US and that officials understood the gravity of the situation.

Seeing how differently the Chinese and US governments handled the outbreak convinced him that he felt safer in China than he does on American soil.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. A 36-year-old US citizen from Cupertino, California, visited Kunming, China, almost 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak originated, on January 25. When the Bay Area resident and user-experience designer — who requested to stay anonymous but whose identity was verified by Business Insider — visited China, there were at least 217 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. And following his trip, he observed just how differently the governments of both countries dealt with the growing outbreak of the virus that has now infected more than 94,000 people and killed more than 3,200 other people. He told Business Insider that he saw locals and Chinese officials understanding the severity of the outbreak and taking safety precautions. That contrasted heavily with his colleagues' blasé attitudes back in the US and a disorderly experience at San Francisco International Airport upon his return on February 2.

In China, he told Business Insider, he noticed precautions being taken. People with luggage inside Hong Kong International Airport on February 22. Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images Cathay Pacific Airways flight attendants wore masks aboard, as did many Chinese residents, he said. The man said locals likely remembered what it was like experiencing the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and knew how to prepare. (While masks can help prevent people who are already sick from spreading the illness, they're not very effective for healthy people trying to avoid getting it. Health experts recommend washing your hands thoroughly and avoiding close contact with people who are sick.) Passengers also went through full-body screenings with infrared thermometers at the airport in Kunming, he said.

When a relative with late-stage cancer died while the man was visiting, the body was taken away by people in protective suits as a precaution. The Chinese government had issued an order to cremate the body of a loved one within 12 hours of their death in case they had the virus, something the man said he and his family followed. A family in Wuhan was described as having to do the same in a New York Times report on February 10.

But returning to the US was a different story. San Francisco International Airport. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images He said "the alarm bells" sounded when he saw how the outbreak was being addressed at San Francisco International Airport. "They literally had no idea what they were doing," he said, adding that one airport official even admitted that since things had escalated so quickly they were in disarray. As passengers got off the plane, no one was at the gate to recording their temperatures, he said. (One of the symptoms of the disease is a fever, though a few cases are asymptomatic.)

He also said no one was wearing masks. It took him hours to go through customs, get his temperature taken at customs, and fill out paperwork. The man said the paperwork that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave him was handwritten and then photocopied. People returning from China were taken from the immigration gate to a designated area to have their temperature taken. But since neither he nor his family members exhibited any symptoms or felt sick, they weren't tested for COVID-19. Passengers coming from China had to wait in "the little black room" in the airport, typically used for passengers with visa problems, he said. The Bay Area resident said immigration officials didn't wear any sort of protection and were impatient with people, telling them to stop asking questions when they inquired about the wait time. "It was really not a good experience at that point," he said.

He completed his quarantine on February 17, but concerns about the virus loom as cases are reported throughout the US. He said that based on his experience in both China and the US as the coronavirus has spread, his family was actually considering going back to China since they felt safer there. "As someone who was in China during the initial outbreak/lockdowns and restrictions and seeing the situation develop here in the US I am 100x more concerned for my own safety during this crisis than I ever was in China," he told Business Insider in a message. As of Thursday, there were 130 confirmed cases in the US across 16 states, including New York and Washington. There have been cases of "community spread" in the US, meaning people who contracted the virus despite not traveling outside the US. And CDC test kits for the virus are limited. "We're the richest country in the world," he said. "We should be the most prepared."