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The government's scramble to atone for its early stonewalling managed to spook the public even more. In villages on the outskirts of Beijing, terrified citizens have set up blockades to bar outsiders from entering. The capital is buzzing with paranoid rumors, for instance that the government is on the verge of closing all public places. "I know this is probably a rumor," says Yu Jun, 32, as he stocked up on supplies at a grocery store. "But right now I'd rather believe rumors than what the government tells me."
There is reason to suspect that Chinese health authorities are continuing to cover up the extent of the crisis. Government sources told TIME that the country's leaders are so terrified of a SARS outbreak in Shanghai, the country's densely packed commercial center, that they have ordered bureaucrats there to preserve the city's "SARS-free" reputation at any cost. "All I have been told is that we must maintain the image of Shanghai as a place without a SARS problem," says a Shanghai health official. The government admitted to two confirmed and 15 suspected cases in the city, but local doctors--who say they have been threatened with dismissal if they speak to foreign journalists--are voicing doubts about that figure. A doctor at the Shanghai Contagious Diseases Hospital told TIME that there were more than 30 suspected cases checked into his hospital alone. In a press conference last Friday, visiting WHO experts said Shanghai had agreed to reform its accounting methods to international norms, which will mean a "substantial increase" in the city's suspected caseload.
News of a widespread Shanghai cover-up would further devastate the credibility of the national government and perhaps threaten the political future of China's new President, Hu Jintao. Until its attempts to come clean last week on the situation in the capital, the Hu government's approach to dealing with SARS had been both craven and ineffectual. After the disease surfaced in China's southern Guangdong province in November, party leaders quashed media reports about its existence, fearing the public would stay home during the Chinese New Year holiday rather than spend money that could spur the economy. By early March, when the government convened the National People's Congress to inaugurate a new slate of senior leaders, doctors and members of China's state-controlled media say they knew about the growing crisis but were prevented from reporting it. "We had stories ready to run," says a journalist in Guangdong. "But before the Congress, we couldn't publish them, and after the Congress, the government didn't want to alarm the people."