It has been overhyped, but underhyped in other ways. I have read, "how is this any different than other flus? Flu kills people every day."
Consider this--one family member comes down with a flu, dies of it, and two other family members also become infected and die from it. That is unheard of in "regular" flus.
Consider--SARS-infected patient shows up at ER, infects the nurse who treats him, both die. Unheard-of with "regular" flus.
Actual numbers of acute presentation remain low compared to "regular" flus.
Strange bug.
Actually that's not unheard of at all in flu country, it's a disease, some people are more susceptible to it than others, some families are more susceptible. With SARS you also have the nurse who treated two improperly diagnosed SARS patients without safety protocols got SARS spent days at home before realizing she had SARS and her husband and two kids didn't even get the sniffles. That's how it goes. Because illness is such a random thing it you get some wierd stuff going on. The thing to remember is that the plural of anecdote isn't fact. The fact of SARS is that it's a poor transmitter with a low yet worrisome death rate. At least those are the facts so far, we must keep in mind that we've only recently gotten enough documented SARS patients to be able to do worthwhile statistical analysis and even with them way too many haven't run the course yet. It's going to be at least a week or two before we've got useful numbers to work with, and depending on what China does it could take even longer. Until then take confidence that we seem to be winning the war against SARS in the free world and keep the worrying to a minimum.