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China Orders Home Quarantine For 4,000 With Exposure to SARS
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BEIJING -- About 4,000 people who have had "intimate contact'' with others showing SARS symptoms have been ordered to stay at home under quarantine, a Beijing health official said Friday.
The announcement by Guo Jiyong, deputy director general of the Beijing Health Bureau, came two days after the capital said it was invoking emergency powers to quarantine people exposed to the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome. At least 39 people in the city have died of SARS.
Mr. Guo didn't say who the people 4,000 people were or how long they had been ordered to stay home.
The city government has designated six hospitals to handle SARS cases. Guo said it might add more, but he gave no details.
City government spokesman Cai Fuchao, speaking at the same news conference, denied rumors that authorities planned to declare martial law in Beijing or close the city's airports and highways. He said inspection teams were being sent to 147 city hospitals to ensure that they were following guidelines on handling potential SARS cases.
Mr. Cai said the city government was coordinated with China's military to ensure that all cases were reported. Military hospitals earlier had failed to report SARS patients to civilian authorities, leading to complaints that China was not fully disclosing information on the outbreak.
Beijing has reported more than 750 cases of SARS infection.
The government's efforts to contain SARS have served only to illustrate official impotence in the face of a population that is freer than ever before from official constraints.
While officials have urged people to stay put -- cutting short a weeklong May Day holiday and urging students to stay on campus and migrant workers to stay at their work sites -- train stations and airports are seeing hordes of masked passengers. The rumors sweeping Beijing that declaration of martial law was imminent have fed a panicked exodus that has been building for days.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Health reported 125 confirmed new cases of SARS, including 89 in the capital, Beijing. In total, China now has 2,422 confirmed cases, in which 1,254 patients have been discharged from the hospital and 110 patients have died.
Thursday, China shut down a major hospital in Beijing and put more than 2,000 employees under observation for SARS. The People's Hospital of Beijing University was being disinfected and its patients and employees were to be moved to one of six hospitals in Beijing designated to handle SARS, the university said.
It didn't say how many patients were involved, but the Web site for People's Hospital says it has 1,020 beds.
World-wide, SARS has sickened more than 4,400 people and killed at least 264.
In Hong Kong Thursday, health officials revised the territory's SARS death rate to 7.2% of all reported cases, from about 5% earlier. But some medical officials believe the real mortality rate may be much higher. That is because the calculation being used includes not just known cases of recovery from the disease but also patients who remain hospitalized -- in other words, people who may yet die.
Four more people died in Hong Kong, bringing the toll to 109, the government said. The South China Morning Post quoted two experts in Thursday's editions as saying the local mortality rate might end up at around 10%.
"Many academics estimated the death rate to be between 5% and 6%," Sydney Chung Sheung-chee, dean of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was quoted as saying. "But I believe it has been underestimated. I would hope that the figure would stay as low as possible, but a conservative estimate would be at least 10%."
Economic Fallout
Meanwhile, Fitch Ratings downgraded its credit-quality outlook on Hong Kong to "negative" from "stable" due to concerns over the potential effect of SARS on the city's economy. The ratings revision comes one day after the government announced a $1.5 billion economic-relief package to bolster confidence during the SARS crisis.
"The relief package is one-off in nature," the government said in a statement in response to the Fitch outlook revision. Standard & Poor's said the package would slow the government's plans to shore up its fiscal position, but it maintained its stable outlook on the city's foreign-currency rating.
In Singapore, Health Minister Lim Hng Kiang said Thursday that 8% to 9% of the island's SARS patients are dying.
The country, which has reported 17 deaths, was preparing a medical camp to hold any of the 2,500 people who are under home quarantine if they disobey orders and go out in public. In Parliament, legislation was introduced Thursday to double current fines for quarantine breakers -- and jail them up to six months without trial.
The World Health Organization expanded an advisory against travel to affected areas, warning against visiting Beijing and the northern province of Shanxi, as well as Toronto. Japan's government extended its own travel warning to cover those areas.
The International Air Transport Association said the effects of the mounting crisis and warnings against travel were "devastating" for airlines. The global airlines body maintained its prediction that the industry could lose around $10 billion this year because of SARS and the Iraq war, which also prompted a downturn in travel.
Starting Friday morning, Hong Kong's Health Department will check the temperatures of all people arriving in Hong Kong at the Lo Wu checkpoint bordering Guangdong province and the Hung Hom seaport, the government said. Starting at midnight Friday, all arriving passengers at Hong Kong's airport will have their temperatures checked.
Australia's Qantas Airways said SARS is having a severe effect on its operations, and unveiled plans to cut some flights and possibly delay delivery of new planes. Qantas said its Australian Airlines single-class unit will suspend five services from late this month or early May, leaving 26 flights to various Asian cities. The unit will cut two services from Cairns to Hong Kong, two services from Cairns to Taipei, and has merged its flights to Osaka and Fukuoka, Japan.
The Hong Kong Hotels Association said it is urging the government to waive the airport tax and the 3% levy on hotel rooms to help the tourism industry offset the effect of the outbreak.
Updated April 25, 2003 12:41 a.m.
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