So they put up these temporary gray metal fencing all around, barricades all around the outside of the perimeter of the hotel, and they have U.S. marshals guarding us to make sure we don't go stir crazy and just make a run for it.

(WSJ's Shan Li and Stephenie Yang were previously quarantined for 11 days in the Chinese province of Hubei, the epicenter of the coronavirus.)

(Both reporters were then flown back to the U.S. and are in a 14-day mandatory quarantine at California military base hotels.)

The plane and the ride was wild, because it's not a normal, commercial passenger jet.

The U.S. State Department had chartered a cargo plane and they had retrofitted it with seats, and then in the back, there was four porta potties.

Between the seats and the porta potties was a white plastic table with two State Department workers in white hazmat suits who would check your temperatures periodically during the flight, so we got our temperature checked three times.

I am at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station where we are going to be held in quarantine for two weeks.

It is federally mandated.

Basically, we're housed in these living quarters that are kind of a cross between a dorm and a motel room.

We get breakfast, lunch, and dinner at designated periods throughout the day.

There are people that come and clean every day, and I've seen them outside as well disinfecting the stairwells and the walls.

On the hallways, on the doors, there are signs saying, you know, best practices for reducing infection.

We get treated pretty well here.

This is a multi-agency effort to make a quarantine like this work.

The CDC is here, of course.

The U.S. Public Health Service, the National Disaster Medical System, and the U.S. Marshals are here, of course, guarding us and also the Administration for Children and Families.

They all work to make this quarantine/summer camp run on a day to day basis.

In the mornings, they ask that we go to the main hall and get our temperature checked, which is then recorded on our log every day.

We have a daily town hall meeting at 2 p.m.

Dinner is 5 to 6, and then at night, they also ask that we test our temperatures by ourselves with the thermometers that we have been given.

And then record those and any potential symptoms also into our daily log.

After being in quarantine in China where we weren't allowed to leave our rooms, this has been a nice change.

Because not only are we allowed to leave our rooms, we get to leave the hotel and actually walk on the grounds of the hotel, which there's a lot of greenery and grass and palm trees.

So that's really nice to be able to go outside and feel the wind and the sun, and there's a lot of kids running around playing.

However, we are not allowed to go further than the hotel grounds.

There's donations of toys for the kids and they've been holding these lawn games, they call it.

So soccer and football drills and also, essentially, boot camp classes.

Folks here are kind of nervous, because some people from my evacuation flight are currently in the hospital being tested for the coronavirus.

(An American citizen who arrived at the Miramar Air Station on a U.S. government-chartered flight out of Wuhan, China, became the first evacuee to test positive for the coronavirus.)

We got word here that one of the evacuees on the first flight into San Diego had tested positive for coronavirus.

The reaction here was, basically, a lot of concern, a lot of questions, particularly because this patient had tested negative initially, returned to the compound, and then tested positive and was returned to the hospital.

The CDC says that they isolated the patient from the time that she returned so that there was no risk to any other residents here.

Some of the residents here are now asking for everyone to be tested for the coronavirus and also for people to be confined to their rooms.

People here at Travis were already quite anxious about socializing with each other.

Most people are keeping to themselves, but after that news came out, they are on heightened alert.

I think there's a lot of questions, whether it's a good idea to keep having outdoor group activities like exercise classes or letting the kids play soccer or football together.

So a quarantine of this scale in the United States is very unusual.

The CDC folks here told me that the last time we had this kind of mass quarantine of a population was in the 1950s, and there really hasn't been anything like this in the U.S. for decades.

During this outbreak, the U.S. government has evacuated about 800 American citizens and their families from Wuhan and put them under quarantine.

Now that's a reasonably controlled population, but in China, we see that they've put about 60 million people under lockdown, under quarantine, and a quarantine of that size is without precedent.

There's never been a quarantine that size before, and it remains to be seen whether a strategy like that is successful or not.