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Created: May 5, 2003
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[The Wall Street Journal] May 12, 2003 PAGE ONE Virus Turns Beijing Into Fear Incubator Residents Shut Out Family; A Catastrophe for Pets? By LESLIE CHANG Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL BEIJING -- As this city fell under the shadow of a deadly pneumonia, Liu Yu telephoned the vet and took down information about killing her cats. "If I am quarantined, what will happen to my cats?" asks Ms. Liu, sitting cross-legged on a rainbow-striped couch in the cozy apartment she hasn't left in almost three weeks for fear of contracting severe acute respiratory syndrome. For now, she and her husband -- and her three cats -- are healthy. But Ms. Liu says she still sees lethal injection as a possible last resort to protect her cats from the police, who have said they will destroy all pets that appear to be sick. "I will definitely not let the government take my cats away. I would prefer to have them euthanized myself." Desperate measures and extreme behavior are now endemic in Beijing, a city under siege from an enemy most of its 13 million residents will never meet. Its 2,265 infected patients are roughly equal in number to those of the next four hard-hit places combined -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Canada. For the past week, the city has averaged more than 70 new cases each day, though that number has been dropping in recent days. [[image]] With automobile traffic way down, with whole streets of shops and restaurants shuttered, and with bicycles back in style as residents shun public transportation, the city seems much as it did decades ago. Its yawning public spaces are nearly deserted. Behavior is a throwback, too. Many residents stay close to home, keep tabs on their neighbors and evince a reflexive distrust of outsiders, as the city's veneer of modernity disappears and its village mentality comes to the fore. Just a few months ago, Beijing was on a roll. Luxury hotels were packed with conferences, delegations and executives planning strategies for the indispensable China market. Mammoth construction projects linked to plans to host the 2008 Olympics were under way. "During the next six years and the Olympic Games, Beijing will become the world's focus," its mayor, Meng Xuenong, said during a national political gathering in March. Instead, Beijing has become the world's focus for something else entirely, and Mr. Meng was fired last month as part of official penance for concealing the scale of Beijing's outbreak. The clang of construction has been stilled, as the armies of migrant construction workers who fled the capital stay away. The World Health Organization's warnings against travel to Beijing have emptied the city of businessmen and tourists. Many of the villa compounds in the suburbs are temporary ghost towns, as their expatriate and wealthy Chinese tenants have fled SARS. Some 70% of residents have cut back on interactions with friends and relatives, while 20% have stopped hugging or kissing family members, according to a recent poll by Beijing's Horizon Research Group. Radio shows interview music celebrities by mobile phone as they sit at home. BATTLING SARS • For full coverage, see SARS: Containing the Outbreak1. • See the latest toll2 from the deadly SARS virus by country. • See a breakdown3 of travel restrictions sparked by SARS. ECONOMIC FALLOUT • Asian Spending Slowly Regains Its Health4 05/08/03 • Airlines Delay Plane Deliveries5 05/08/03 "People are so terrified of SARS that they are afraid to come out. People who are stuck at home call to ask us if they can go out for a walk," says Zhang Xing, a medical-school intern who has volunteered at a 24-hour SARS hot line since his hospital shut down to regular patients after being designated as one for treating SARS. "We have to first work on a small group of people to come out, and they can draw out the others." Almost none of the callers, he and others at the hot line say, actually know anyone who has the disease. The government's methods are actually feeding fears. For more than a month, Beijing was silent on the seriousness of SARS in the capital. When the ultimate admission finally came late in April, it brought with it the reminder that an authoritarian government has just one volume setting: loud. The government has declared doctors who have died of SARS "revolutionary martyrs" and urged Communist Party members to lead a "people's war" against the virus. Government newspapers blare headlines on every aspect of the outbreak, such as "Fear Weakens the Immune System" and "No Funeral Rites for SARS Patients' Remains." Several songs about SARS are already being played, with inspirational titles such as "Walking Shoulder to Shoulder," "Brothers and Sisters" and "Because of Love." The sudden shift in tone has compounded people's anxieties. Experts worry about "SARS Terror Syndrome," and the city has set up several telephone hot lines to counsel callers. The craze for disinfecting everything has gotten out of hand: Beijing newspapers report that residents have accidentally set fire to surgical masks, mobile phones and money by attempting to disinfect them in microwave ovens. The central bank and other banks are literally laundering money -- taking in cash for 24 hours and sterilizing bills before putting them back into circulation. The specter of primal China and its fear of the outside world is vivid even in modern apartment complexes and office blocks, with their glass-and-steel facades and stylish storefronts. Many buildings have set up a system of permits that keep out all outsiders. Guards have returned to the brusqueness and vigilance of old. Posters put up by one residential building's management urge tenants to "minimize contact with the outside world." The virus has revitalized at least one institution: the neighborhood committees that are the grass-roots units in the Communist Party's urban network. The rickety pale-pink building housing the Bakeyang neighborhood committee, sandwiched between a PriceSmart shopping outlet and a construction site, was supposed to be torn down this year. Now it is enjoying a new lease on life. It has set up a "Disinfection Volunteers Team" of residents. Neighbors are stopping by at their own initiative -- primarily to complain that things aren't clean enough. "Now everyone worries about the garbage," says Wang Rencheng, the director of the committee. "We are much busier now." People who used to get around a lot have become near-recluses. Ms. Liu, the cat owner, speaks good English and works for a Danish company that supplies materials to the petrochemical industry. These days, she spends almost all of her time working from home with computer and telephone, leaving only for short walks. Her husband, a manager at a nearby Carrefour supermarket, brings home groceries and bikes home for lunch and dinner. Ms. Liu disinfects the apartment every other day; she does her husband's accoutrements of mobility -- shoes, wallet, mobile phone -- every day. "My husband's business is high-risk, so I must especially lower my risk," she says. "Sometimes I wish that there would be one SARS case at the store, so my husband could be quarantined at home and I could be less afraid." Then there is the matter of killing pets. Virologists outside China have speculated that the SARS virus originated in animals, more likely farm or wild animals than house pets, and mutated into a disease people can catch. So, that has been bruited about on Chinese TV, and people worry, without evidence, that they can contract SARS from their cats and dogs. Many pet owners have abandoned their animals. Police in Xicheng, a district of Beijing, have announced that all pets with "suspicious symptoms" will be killed, along with stray dogs. Newspapers have reported that three dogs linked to SARS have already been killed. The Beijing city government has issued similar guidelines. At the Saijia Animal Hospital on the west side of town, veterinarian Yin Tieyuan says he has been getting between 30 and 40 phone calls a day from people terrified of catching SARS from their pets or worried that local police will beat their animals to death if a single case of SARS shows up in their neighborhood. "A lot of people are asking, if I start to feel ill, can I bring my animal in to be euthanized?" says Mr. Yin. He says a few have brought in their animals for him to kill on the spot. He has refused on the ground that healthy animals shouldn't be put to death. In the course of a morning, Mr. Yin sees only a single patient -- a panting Pekingese he treated for symptoms having nothing to do with SARS -- but fields a flood of phone calls from pet owners sitting at home worrying. He assures everyone who calls that he hasn't seen a single dog with SARS, but he acknowledges that people are right to be worried about how authorities might handle their pets. The government, he says, "can barely take care of the people, never mind the dogs." Write to Leslie Chang at leslie.chang@wsj.com6 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105267453291277300,00.html Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_1011,00.html (2) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104922980154110400,00.html (3) javascript:%20window.open('http://online.wsj.com/documents/info-sarsadv03-fset.html','sarsadv03','toolbar=no,scrollbars=no,location=no,width=740,height=510,left=70,top=30');%20void(''); (4) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105241769793645100,00.html (5) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105234174752703000,00.html (6) mailto:leslie.chang@wsj.com Updated May 12, 2003 Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved