In the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, dozens of students on their Ph.D. summer programs were stranded when the city of Yangzhou was locked down in late July due to the sudden Delta variant outbreak.

Deep in the woods on the outskirts of Yangzhou, a group of 18 students spent their quarantine in a hotel.

Wang Jia and Huang Yiming are graduate students from Zhejiang University in east China's Zhejiang Province, south of Yangzhou. They were working with a technology company in the city when the latest Delta outbreak occurred.

"For security concerns, the Yangzhou government moved us to a low-risk area in early August, which is the forest park we are staying now," said Huang Yiming, a graduate student from the School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University.

The local government also provided the students with an online psychological consultant, said Wang Jia, who studies at the same school. "The good thing about living in the woods is that you can concentrate on your paper most of the time," she said.

Yi Lei, a graduate student at the Energy and Power Engineering Department of Tsinghua University in Beijing, is the team leader of a summer program for his schoolmates in Yangzhou.

When the city began reporting an increase in coronavirus cases, he was anxious. But the Yangzhou government's human resources and social security department stepped in to help.

"My schoolmates and I are really grateful for the help. We see that the number of new cases in Yangzhou is now in the single digits. With such efforts, we believe that this outbreak will be over soon," Yi said.

So far, 42 graduate students from other universities outside the city are stranded in Yangzhou. Officials say they will be allowed to return to their schools as soon as the situation improves.