Panic is on the rise in China following the outbreak of the deadly SARS virus.
Hundreds of students and migrant workers with white masks thronged Beijing railway stations today to flee the city, and disinfection squads spread across the country, Reuters reported.
 Passengers at Beijing airport fill out health card (photo: Shanghai Daily) |
The Singapore Straits Times said today China dispatched special squads to round up sick people, and Singapore vowed to jail citizens who defied quarantine orders as governments adopted increasingly desperate measures to contain the epidemic.
Workers in China sprayed public transportation facilities, and the communist government canceled domestic travel tours. Schools were shut down in Beijing, where in just three days the government has raised the toll of cases from 37 to 588.
Officially, 2,158 cases have been identified in 19 cities, and the disease could explode across the country of 1.3 billion if immediate measures are not taken, the World Health Organization warned. Ninety-seven people in China have died so far.
Reuters said a sea of faces in white cotton masks clogged the square in front of Beijing Railroad Station in hopes of getting on one of the dozens of trains going to the north, south and west.
“I’m going home because I’m scared of getting sick,” said Deng Pao, a 30-year-old migrant worker from Zhengzhou in Henan province. “I’ve been in Beijing for two months and had a good job, but it’s not worth it.”
After hiding the true extent of the outbreak in Beijing for weeks, China has leaped into damage control, Reuters said. State media have begun to report more honest infection levels, and the health minister and mayor were fired Sunday.
Analysts said the government’s decision to appoint Vice Premier Wu Yi as interim health minister is an attempt to reassure foreign investors and repair damage to the country’s image.
A member of the Communist Party’s elite 24-member Politburo, Wu is China’s most senior woman politician. Dubbed the “Iron Lady,” she helped avert a trade war with the United States in the 1990s and is respected by foreigners for her no-nonsense style, Reuters said.
China’s economy could suffer considerable damage from the outbreak, contracting by as much as 2 percent this quarter after years of about seven percent annual growth, according to investment bank JP Morgan Chase.
SARS also could provoke Singapore’s worst crisis since independence 37 years ago, Reuters said.
Seeking to reassure foreign investors, David Eldon, chairman of Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., said, “People still want to invest in China. All they want is a little bit of certainty as to how they are dealing with a situation like this and are they getting the information in a timely way.”
Eldon said “if China can quickly demonstrate that they are dealing with that as an issue, then I think the foreign direct investors will still be interested in investing in China.”
Reuters noted, however, that half of the business leaders scheduled to accompany French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on a visit to China this Friday decided against coming because of SARS. The two-day trip was trimmed to one day and extra doctors were put on standby.
