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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (95181)	4/20/2003 9:49:16 AM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

First, I don't think the source of this report is convincing enough. And if it is true, the "Hiding" must be authorized by the hospital authority, NOT the Beijing municipal gov. Second, yesterday, the National Health Ministry had a news conference, and got an update number in Beijing, 346 confirmed SARS case, and 402 suspected cases. There are 3 types of hospitals in Beijing, and they are administrated by 3 unrelated officials, Central-gov., Beijing municipality, and Military, and they are totally disconnected among themselves. And that is the reason why there were NO accurate number in Beijing before. And now the Central gov. has ordered Beijing municipal gov. take the lead in all the SARS case for all types of hospitals, and this would help a lot to get a more accurate numbers. If one argues that China has very backward health structure, and has NO surveillance system for communicable disease, and had underestimated the seriousness of SARS, has not invested enough into the national health system, and had not done enough publicity on SARS back in February, I agree. But if they say Chinese central gov. deliberately "hide" or "cover-up" SARS cases, I think they are way off. And NO one could have anticipated the scale and easy-to-spread of SARS in advance. Backsight is always 20:20. Even if HK, which has a much more transparent system, and which has had enough publicity on SARS from the beginning, still has not effectively controlled the spreading of SARS. Today's news, HK has another 15 big apartment buildings found to have SARS virus. As for "China sacks minister over Sars", that is a given, because he has lost credibility in public. BTW, today I read that the scientists from China suspected that SARS virus may come from cats, because Cantonese has a custom to eat them, and atypical pneumonia is known among cats.