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SARS and rumors of
SARS
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - On Wednesday it rained all day in
Beijing, signaling the coming of autumn and, with it,
fears of the return of severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS). The temperature dropped about 10 degrees Celsius
- but the rumor mill heated up.
Also on
Wednesday, Hong Kong health authorities raised a SARS
alert as they isolated seven male patients who had
developed symptoms of the deadly virus. The alert, the
first stage of a new three-tier SARS warning, was issued
after patients at the territory's Castle Peak Hospital
were moved to an isolation ward at Tuen Mun Hospital
with high fever and upper-respiratory-tract infections.
However, preliminary X-ray examinations found no traces
of SARS in their lungs.
Over the past weeks,
Chinese newspapers have exhorted the population to
greater hygiene and to get anti-influenza shots. Workers
in gray overalls sprayed the sidewalks in front of
buildings hosting foreign offices, and trucks full of
disinfectant watered the roads as if they were lawns.
People are once more deserting the hospitals.
But no one is depriving himself of a good meal at a
restaurant, or of a dance at the newest disco, or a
massage at the parlor downtown.
The official
spokespeople in China say they don't know of any cases
of SARS. That may be true as far as it goes, for how
could anyone be sure that there is not a single SARS
case in a country of 1.3 billion people? They don't know
of any cases, but they don't know there are not any
cases, either.
So everything goes back to the
question posed at the beginning of the SARS epidemic in
April, that of political transparency. In a closed
system like China's, anyone can imagine the worst and
not be happy with anything less than total transparency.
The alarm bells in fact went off last week, when
Singapore reported the infection of a medical
researcher.
If there can be new SARS cases in
Singapore, how can it be that there are no new cases in
China, where the disease flourished so strongly last
spring? Where did all the small flare-ups of infection
in the provinces go? In May the Chinese papers reported
dozens of them, but after a few days no one heard of
them any longer. Was there a cover-up?
Nobody
can answer these questions for certain and, more
important, given the present lack of transparency,
nobody can bail the Chinese government out of this
difficult predicament. In other words, given the ongoing
alert for SARS in the world, the lack of transparency in
China itself inspires fear and alarm, whether anyone is
ill with SARS or not.
China, then, is paying and
will continue to pay a price for its primitive political
system. Nobody is sure about how high this price will
be. But if SARS ravages Hong Kong again and the World
Health Organization gets nervous, the price could be
very high. Paradoxically, if China were to declare a few
cases, then the toll could be milder. It could also be
very high, because nobody knows what will come out if
the Pandora's box of SARS is opened again.
These
are only hypotheses while the cold moves in and the
Beijing rumor mill works at full speed, triggered by
every cough and fever all over the city. In April, to
recover some international confidence, the government
had to sack two ministerial-ranking officials. Now what
could be done to assuage these fears? Once more the real
issue is that of transparency. We said it in April: the
real disease is political (see Beijing loses big on SARS gamble,
April 8). China needs greater transparency, but it also
needs to support the full weight of its Communist Party
organization.
It is a difficult balance, but
SARS in the end is only a fig leaf. If the balance is
not struck correctly, China could be hurt very, very
badly.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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