"SARS is under control!"
Posted on 04/24/2003 2:09:46 PM PDT by SpinnerWebb
Granted... a lot of "friend" of "friend" of "my brother's uncle's second cousin's dog"...... but I received this e-mail today:
My brother is a diplomat, and is representing Brazil at Beijing (China).
A friend of him, journalist, sent him and everybody else on his mailing list these heartfelt impressions of the situation they have all been going through in recent weeks.
My brother "censored" three words to preserve the source.
------------------------ Dear All:
Last night around 7pm I wandered out of my office building in the center of Beijing's business district and made it three steps toward the pedestrian escalator before I registered that something was definitely wrong.
I looked around and realized that it could have been midnight Sunday rather than high rush hour Wednesday - few people, little traffic and very, very quiet. It could have been a cheap local version of that 1970s made-for-TV post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick "Where Have All the People Gone?" (like me, I'm sure you're all fans of that product of Mission Impossible's gravel-voiced Peter Graves' "will-work-for-food" period classic) but sadly, nay, impressively (this being Beijing where things are rarely uncrowded and certainly not often quiet) it's the way things are out here right now.
Because this is the week that Beijingers got their comeupance after weeks of rather smug parroting of government denials about SARS that ranged from paid-professorial tut-tutting about how a "British approach" (rather than indigenous Chinese) to medicine was responsible for the extent of contagion in Hong Kong to rabid insistence from authorities that all was so well in China that there weren't even going to be any public travel precautions issued to incoming tourists for Guangdong or Hong Kong.
The WHO advisories against travel to Hong Kong and Guangdong that followed were initially greeted with scepticism and anger - China yet again being "picked-on" by the international community, etc. People, even those who knew better, clung to the official figures of 37 infections and 4 deaths with talisman-like intensity, even as whispers began to fly from people with friends or relatives in Beijing hospitals that emergency care wards were filled with SARS cases and that the government was (what else?) lying through its teeth about the extent of the problem.
We had our false alarms of course. Reports of companies in our twin tower, 23-storey office complex closed and sealed due to SARS infections among employees. I was dispatched one morning last week to get to the bottom of the matter and soon found myself wandering around corporate China's answer to the Marie Celeste - a darkened IT company office whose half-ajar door led me down ranks of cubicles decorated with family photographs and Hello Kitty paraphernalia that looked like they'd been abandoned just minutes before. Workers in a neighboring office hadn't seen the staff in days. Building management assured us that the company and its employees had split after not paying rent. Who knows?
And then through the jungle telegraph came more ominous messages - multiple SARS cases, overwhelmed hospitals, sick medical workers - in areas that were prime destinations for the (then yet-to-be-cancelled) May 1 holiday. Days before Time magazine and AP confirmed it, the local rumor mill spread word of "midnight runs" by hospital ambulances and buses loaded with SARS cases put on the road to hoodwink WHO investigators desperate to get a fix on the extent of the spread of illness.
But in spite of that, as late as Saturday, my Chinese teachers were adamant in reassuring me that all was well, that the outbreak was under control and that the government had things in hand. Later that day, I flew to Shanghai to cover the Shanghai International Auto Show, where the wide berth given the very large, central aid station set-up "for people suffering fevers or discomfort" put a lie to the rictal grins and back-slapping of auto execs insisting "how well everything is going "...in spite of everything that's going on." The show was closed Wednesday, three days early, due to health concerns.
Today here in Beijing what's really going on is out of the bag. Confirmed SARS cases are near twenty-times the original dolman-like official tally of last week and set to increase daily as the government inexplicably doles out its humiliation and face-loss in drip doses after weeks of deception and inaction. And suddenly - finally - everybody's scared.
Beijingers have suddenly accepted that the situation may well be very grave indeed.. Almost overnight, face masks are everywhere, and increasing by the day as people realize that (yet again) not only are things bad, but most likely far worse than the official line lets on. In the face of government calls for "hand washing and adherence to regular routine", Beijingers have gone into survival mode, channelling what in other places might be panic into a relatively even, laser-like focus on Living Through This.
Exhibit A of those efforts was illustrated by visits today to a couple of supermarkets where I witnessed people calmly and methodically clearing shelves of bagged rice, cooking oil and instant noodles. I can't say they're overreacting. The rumor/jungle telegraph (its track record is considerably better than the govt's to date) has it that the city is about to be sealed off to belatedly prevent the spread of SARS to the countryside.
After the ambulance "midnight runs", scepticism about this rumor is considerably lower-key than you might think. I tested the rumor tonight as I did my own version of hoarding - three boxes of Post Banana Nut Crunch cereal - at a little store near the diplomatic compound. "I'll need these because Beijing will be sealed of tomorrow!" I proclaimed to the staff (who are used to such behavior as their location lends them to trade with new arrivals, unruly Russians and people with inappropriate currency). Grins and snickers from the staff while the cashier said softly "Sir, don't worry, they're not blocking off the city until Friday." So there.
More ominous for expats is word that the Beijing Capital Airport will be shut down indefintely at the end of the month - say by next Wednesday - to complete the seal. Suddenly all the recent, hasty trips abroad by various diplomatic contacts are making sense in the twisted, conspiratorial lens of The Outbreak.
Remember all those exultant corporate media reports about the boom in private car ownership in China? (since I happen to recall that sales of domestically-produced passenger cars doubled on-year to 383,400 vehicles in the first quarter, I plead guilty-as-charged)They're the spearhead of Beijing's SARS-fueled exodus. Every morning and evening travel between my home and office gets faster because suddenly there are fewer cars on the road. I picture ranks of shiny new GM Buick Sail and VW Polo models packed with Spicy Chef Noodles and dubious herbal SARS prophylactics bumper-tapping toward perceived safety in the dunes north of the Great Wall.
People who can do so are splitting, fast. A sizable proportion of those left are locking their apartment doors, duct-taping the cracks and waiting for this to either "blow over" (fat chance) or kill off their neighbors. The rest go to work and remark on the markedly improved traffic of recent days. So it goes.
Meanwhile, in our office the feeling of walls-closing-in among the expat staff gets more intense by the day. A month-long company ban on overseas travel by any of we China-based staff remains in effect and a repeal - like a treatment, a vaccine - looks improbable in the short term, to say the least.
Tonight, Beijing joined Hong Kong, Guangdong and (who would have thought?) Toronto on the WHO Hot Zone list, struck from approved international "non-essential travel" destinations, increasing the likeliehood that our welcome at foreign airports in the short term is likely to be anything but warm. A Singaporean guy in our Hong Kong office, where conditions have been much worse - mandatory 3M M95 face masks, all day, every day (try it) , daunting, truthful death tolls updated regularly, etc - cracked the other day. Just walked. Told management to the effect that he'd rather die in Singapore than Hong Kong and with one bag and a very bad job reference hopped the next plane home.
Me? I've got perspective.
I read Nevil Shute's "On The Beach" when I was 10 years old and devoured every day-after-doomsday comic book, crap novel, tv show and movie I could get my hands on since. As far as I can see, the end of the world this ain't. And for once I'm spared the self-reproach that things would have been much better if I had just stayed in XXXXXX and gotten a "normal" job back in XXXXXXX. But with a tip of the hat to my fellow Beijing- ren, I've put in an order with my favorite bootleg DVD vendor for a copy, - somehow, somewhere - of "Where Have All The People Gone?".
Just in case.
Love to all.
Be careful out there
XXXXXXX
Reminds me of Chuck Heston's movie The Omega Man which is a good sci-fi movie along the lines of SARS.
"SARS is under control!"
Ominous description of Shanghai.
Or, it may be prudent. Heck, I don't know. It is clear that China had the first cases and didn't recognize them as a new illness. That's perfectly understandable. But they also hoped it would go away by itself, certainly without attracting any negative attention.
Then, they actively covered up.
I find the tidbit about the aid station at the car show in Shanghai to be very interesting. We still are getting rosy reports from there.
The Chinese haven't even managed this obvious panic well. It's obvious that exposed people are now fleeing the city and taking the virus around the country. Beijing should have shut down the city as soon as they realized that they would have to admit to the problem.
Maybe they were afraid of civil unrest if they tried that. More likely, they were afraid of the economic signal it would send to the rest of the world.
In any event, everything they've done so far seems to have made things worse. If and when this passes, China will suffer a backlash from both outside and within.
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