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Until last week, Hong Kong's health officials had downplayed the threat of the virus to avoid public panic. To ease fears, government officials announced that cases appeared to be confined mainly to the city's Prince of Wales Hospital, which received more than one-quarter of the territory's total infections and where more than 100 health-care workers had contracted the disease in the facility's cramped wards. But on March 23, after Dr. William Ho, chief executive of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority, was admitted to hospital with atypical pneumonia, fear of a major outbreak began to seize the public consciousness as the disease spread beyond the Prince of Wales Hospital. By Saturday, more than 100 residents of a Kowloon housing estate had come down with SARS. A branch of the Bank of East Asia was shut down when an employee contracted the disease. The Central Library was closed. On March 28 alone, 58 new cases were confirmed.
Hong Kong now looks like a city under threat of biological-weapons attack. Almost overnight the streets have filled with people wearing surgical and industrial face masks, as if shopping malls and subway stations had suddenly morphed into vast hospital wards. Convenience-store clerks, shopkeepers, bus drivers and even TV talk-show hosts are wearing masks, the latter while on camera. Doctors say the devices can hamper the spread of the disease by corralling coughs and sneezes and by preventing people from touching their noses and mouths. Even transit companies and political parties are handing masks out on the street by the thousands, helping calm citizens who are searching for any incremental advantage over this little-known stalker. Naturally, in this most economically minded of cities, street hawkers are price gouging, charging several dollars each for tissue-thin masks sporting pirated cartoon characters such as Pokèmon and Hello Kitty. "Forget about Scud missiles and smart bombs, we could all die if someone with the disease merely coughs," Shirley Li, a Hong Kong resident, told Reuters when explaining why she makes her son wear a mask in public.
The hot-zone atmosphere has unsettled natives and expatriates. Keesler Cronin was already jumpy when she recently took her nine-year-old son to a doctor because he had a sore throat. "Everyone in the office had masks when we got there," Cronin says. But that scene wasn't as bad as what the doctor had to say: "He said, 'If you have the means to leave Hong Kong, I would pack your family and get out of here for a month.' It put the fear of God in me." At Yiu Him House, an apartment complex in northern Hong Kong where several people have been diagnosed with SARS, cleaners last week scrubbed down staircases, elevators and lobbies with disinfectant. A resident who identifies herself only as Mrs. Man eagerly discussed Hong Kong's hottest conversational topic—the different kinds of masks and their prices. "It's good that they're cleaning the building more," she said through a thin paper mask. "One night I saw that they hadn't cleared the garbage, and the next day some people here got atypical pneumonia. You can't be too scared. I'm quite scared, but there's nothing I can do."
Visitors, too, are feeling jittery. "I usually shake hands with everyone when I meet them," says Raynald Denis, a fashion retailer from Montreal who was in Hong Kong and the mainland on business last week. "But on this trip I tried to minimize all contact." Although Hong Kong has not been declared off-limits by the WHO, some governments have issued travel advisories cautioning against visiting destinations with known SARS cases. The Canadian government said it might ban flights to Hong Kong, Singapore and Hanoi if the situation worsens. The Rolling Stones rock band canceled their much-anticipated pair of concerts in Hong Kong. Another major local event, the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens, went ahead but without teams from Italy, France and Argentina, which all stayed home because of the SARS outbreak.
Citizens of overcrowded Hong Kong were hypersensitized to the threats of a rogue virus long before AIDS or the movie Outbreak. The regional transportation hub and trading entrepôt borders Guangdong province and has long been associated with the outbreak of new diseases. The city even has a disease named for it—the Hong Kong flu, which killed 700,000 people globally from 1968-1969, infecting 30% of the world's population in less than nine months. Since 1997, local health authorities also have been periodically quelling eruptions of the avian flu, which is one of the few deadly diseases thought to directly jump from birds to humans.
No surprise, then, that Hong Kong's vigilant residents were calling for a comprehensive battle plan against SARS long before their bureaucrats belatedly announced their anti-SARS blueprint on March 27. Parents who have school-age children and local lawmakers accused the government of being complacent and keeping silent about SARS to protect the already fragile economy. But Selina Chow, a legislator and chairman of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, maintains that officials have had to be careful not to start a panic. "We are not just dealing with the scientific containment, we're also dealing with the psychological effect," she says. The decision last Thursday to close local schools for a week and monitor 1,080 people who had close contact with SARS victims "is not due to a scientific need but rather is a move to calm the worries of parents. It's come to a point where, strictly speaking, some of the measures are not for medical reasons."