Duke student returns to Holly Springs from China amid coronavirus outbreak

"I’m just wearing it as an extra precaution because I was traveling through a crowded area with different people [and] didn’t know where everyone was from," Greig said Tuesday.

Duke also restricted all university travel to China on Tuesday.

"I’m more nervous not for myself but for giving it to other people," she said. "I just don’t want to be the reason that someone else gets it, because I traveled home."

DKU students routinely wore masks on campus for safety, Greig said, as did many others in China.

"Depending where you go, you see everyone wearing masks, or a few people wearing masks," she said. "It’s different and, at first, it was a little bit of an adjustment, going out to classes seeing everyone wearing a mask. You get used to it."

Greig said she believes DKU has taken ample safety precautions, with extra hand sanitizer stations. A couple days before she left, the campus went into lockdown.

"We couldn't leave campus. We could walk within the campus grounds, [but] once you left campus, you couldn't come back," she said.

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Officials at the Shanghai airport were likewise careful to limit the spread of the virus, she said.

"After the initial security check at the door, we went through a health screening, where they removed our masks and checked our body temperature and checked us overall to see if we’re healthy," she said.

Greig said she and her family have lived through an outbreak before.

"My parents have been a little nervous. We were in Hong Kong during the time of the SARS virus and left because of it," she said.

She said she's glad to be home but worries about some of her classmates who weren’t able to get back to their families.

"I think about them and the situations that they’re in and how fortunate I am to be home," she said, adding that she hopes everyone can be back on campus soon.