Orderlies wheeled the transfer patient into the respiratory department of the Zhongshan No. 3 Hospital on the morning of Feb. 1. He was wheezing and could barely breathe. "I didn't think he'd last 24 hours," recalls Dr. Cao Hong, the department chief. As Cao and a nurse pried open the man's jaws and began an emergency intubation, inserting a pipe down his throat to resume the flow of oxygen, they became victims of what can only be described as the point-blank detonation of a virus bomb. "When we moved the tube down his throat, he started coughing," the doctor says. "His mucus flew all over the place and on our shirts."
The hospital had been notified only one day earlier of a strange new disease sweeping through the province, and had taken some precautions. Both Cao and the nurse wore masks. But the man they treated was no ordinary patient. A seafood dealer, he would become known to Chinese as the "Poison King," the first super spreader of what would later be identified as the SARS virus. The Poison King (Time is protecting his anonymity) recovered, but by the time he went home, he had infected as many as 90 people, including Cao (who has since recovered), the nurse and health-care workers in three different hospitals that treated him. Not only that, it is possible that the highly contagious businessman also gave the virus to a doctor in one of those hospitals who would travel to Hong Kong three weeks later and check into the Metropole Hotel—thought to be the point where SARS first surfaced outside of China. An unknown disease, incubated in China's southern Guangdong province, was loosed upon the world.
Epidemiologists are still trying to trace the arc of the deadly pathogen. Through interviews with health care workers, victims and local journalists in Guangdong, Time has pieced together some of the key events during the opening phases of the outbreak. It's now clear that in early February, while doctors were treating the Poison King, the disease had been spreading through several cities in southern China. Quick action might have slowed it, if not contained it. Certainly doctors and nurses worked bravely against the mysterious threat, caring for victims even as colleagues died of the infection. Yet as health officials raced to identify the disease they faced, official cover-ups and dissembling meant valuable information was withheld not only from the public, but also from the health-care workers who were trying to save lives.
The trail begins in Foshan, a boomtown of garment mills and electronics factories surrounded by farmland. Health authorities there have worked backwards through medical records and traced the outbreak to the first known SARS case, a man in Foshan who showed signs of the illness on Nov. 16. This was a chance to look into the source of the virus, and perhaps confirm researchers' suspicions that it had jumped to humans from pigs or fowl. But neither Guangdong officials nor experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) who interviewed the victim this month managed to elicit much useful information. The man was terrified by the interrogation and wanted to keep secret from family and friends that the illness he contracted in November was SARS. In another disappointment, the WHO team eventually determined that the man probably wasn't the "index patient"—the first known carrier. "I was hoping to find some unusual animal exposure," says Robert Breiman, the head of the WHO. There was none. "It was pretty much run of the mill."
Investigators are still searching for victim No. 1, in part to unlock the mystery of how SARS jumped host species. Also unknown is how the disease hitchhiked to Heyuan city, 200 kilometers from the provincial capital of Guangzhou. On Dec. 15, two patients checked into the Heyuan Municipal Hospital suffering from a pneumonia that wouldn't respond to antibiotics. It quickly spread to five hospital workers. As more patients came in, rumors of a murderous flu spread to the city at large, inciting panic. Crowds gathered outside packed drugstores on Jan. 2 seeking any medicine that might treat flu. "All of a sudden people were flooding in and I didn't know why, but I sold as much antibiotics in a day as I sold last year," says a clerk at the Chun Tang pharmacy. Anxious to calm the populace, the local center for disease control faxed a letter to the Heyuan News at 1 a.m. on Jan. 3, which ran in the next day's paper. The article insisted that "Heyuan has no epidemic virus, we hope residents don't panic." The alarm subsided within days.
That story was the last to appear in the local press for more than a month. Provincial Party leaders, anxious to avoid spreading fear and still unsure what the disease was, barred media from covering what happened in Heyuan—and what would happen elsewhere. Even after doctors from several major hospitals in Guangzhou visited Heyuan and diagnosed patients there as victims of atypical pneumonia, ordinary Chinese were kept in the dark. Su Guoqiang, a 37-year-old who runs his family's seafood restaurant on Food Street in the small county of Beijiao, was clueless when he drove 40 km to a wholesale market in the city of Zhongshan in mid-January to stock up on shellfish and shrimp. More than 20 people there had fallen ill, including 12 at the Zhongshan Traditional Medicine Hospital. As in Heyuan, word filtered out to the city; once again residents, fearing an epidemic, stampeded to drug stores for antibiotics. They even hoarded food and vinegar, which was supposed to purify the air when boiled.