Hong Kong Says SARS Quarantine Working

Associated Press ^ | April 21, 2003 | MIN LEE

[CathyRyan]

HONG KONG -- Efforts to contain the spread of SARS by quarantining households of victims and tracking down potential contacts are paying off, and Hong Kong's government leader said Monday he is growing more confident about beating the disease.

Hong Kong reported six more SARS deaths on Monday, bringing the toll here to 94. There were 22 new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, for a total of 1,402, but 436 patients have recovered and been discharged from hospitals.

[Judith Anne]

If this is a)true b)reliable and c)not one of the expected peaks and troughs in an epidemic, then this may be good news.

[CathyRyan]

I do not have a clue. I just posted it because I thought it might be something to chew up. :)

[Judith Anne]

;-D

[per loin]

Hong Kong shut its schools March 29 after some students got sick with SARS, although there has been no evidence it was spread in classrooms.

Li told Commercial Radio Monday the number of students infected jumped from 12 to more than 60 while the schools were closed. Students who got SARS apparently were infected by relatives or health care workers.

They moved quickly on shutting schools, and hopefully are not moving too quickly in reopening them. Hate to see them lose a war that they now seem close to winning.

[CathyRyan]

I am starting to feel optimistic about the whole thing. I have been in a stew for a week about which way this was going and what to do and how to plan for the future. This is one of those fork in life's road kind of things.

[aristeides]

Good news if true.

[per loin]

Hong Kong has to walk a fine line between strangling itself with restrictions and loosening up too fast. It looks like they're doing a good job of it, but they'll need some decent luck too. Toronto and Singapore also seem to be on the right track. But the situation in China could destroy the effect of all that hard work, and much of the third world is at risk. Keeping track of travelers from infected areas is one game, tracing contacts through the slums of a third world city another.

[EternalHope]

We all hope and pray this is true, and not a false dawn. The person giving the press conference declined to take questions.

Hong Kong doctors were saying the city had used up its available isolation rooms and respirators as of Monday of last week. The government of Hong Kong announced they would start using a much more aggressive treatment regimen at the same time.

Deaths went up, but so did the number of patients discharged. Hong Kong may have turned the corner at essentially the same time as it ran out of resources.

Alternatively, it is possible that Hong Kong is simply letting the worst cases die in order to free up resources for those they think they can save. Likewise, they may be sending others home earlier than than they would have before, in order to free up space in isolation wards.

Time will tell.

[wretchard]

The SARS outbreak is a comparatively gentle (if the word can be used) introduction to the dangers of emerging pathogens (natural and manmade). It's the storm petrel but not the storm. Many of the restrictions now routinely employed by Singapore, HK and Canada exceed the the most maligned contingencies of Homeland Defense. And it is still not clear whether these restrictions are enough.

So far, we have mandatory quarantines, monitored by webcams and electronic bracelets, thermal scanners at airports, pre-embarkation screening, profiling, etc. We also have behavioral changes such as the closure or abandonment of places of entertainment, the wearing of face masks, disposable handlers for doorknobs, ATM buttons, etc.

People criticized many aspects of Homeland Defense as facist or draconian, yet it amazing to see how quickly people accepted worse, and self-imposed a variety of restrictions in the face of SARS, which is nowhere as lethal as, for example, a bioweapon like smallpox. The danger is real, and it doesn't have to come from Osama.

[aristeides]

Triage. It used to be a necessary event on the battlefield.

[aristeides]

I read this on flyingchair.net, from Hong Kong:

The government announced tonight that senior high school students would return to classes tomorrow. Schools in Hong Kong have been closed for three weeks.

[Walkingfeather]

Not when people realize that they just go home and die from sars. The reason people survive from it ( if they do) is they are on resperators. When the resperators are all occupied then you will see the death rate go up expidentially. I have not heard of one person that has gone home and got better? Have any of you?

[aristeides]

I think the man in Goa went home and got better.

[per loin]

So far what we've seen are the restrictions placed by quite civilized societies, acting within their means. As the situation in remoter areas of China becomes more seeable, we may begin to find out the sort of measures that will be taken to halt the epidemic's spread when its size exceeds the medical abilities to deal with it. I suspect some of those restrictions will become stringent enough that many attempt to avoid them.

If SARS gets loose in the wider third world, we may not want to watch too closely, and the chances of such a breakout are hard to overestimate. Poon, India has three cases, and though they sound to be among the fairly well to do, Poon has a million or so slum dwellers, who use either public toilet facilities or the street. If the analysis of the Amoy Garden outbreak is correct, that it was caused by sewage, then what happens when the slumfolk of Poon develop the diarrea that oft accompanies SARS?