Fear of virus turning Hong Kong into ghost town

By JEREMY LAURANCE in Hong Kong

This is a disappearing city. The streets of Hong Kong are emptying as the population take to their homes in self-imposed quarantine against the pneumonia virus that they have come to dread.

Yesterday's admonition to travellers to avoid the region from the World Health Organisaton will turn Hong Kong into a ghost town.

In the last few days, as the number of cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has mounted inexorably, the city's facade of normality has started to crack. The Government yesterday opened two more "holiday camps" for the residents of a tower block on the Amoy Gardens Estate badly hit by the virus, bringing the total to four.

The World Health Organisation defended its first-ever advice to travellers to avoid a country for medical reasons on the grounds that SARS was still spreading in the city and nine travellers from Beijing, Taiwan and Singapore had returned home with the disease after visiting Hong Kong.

But the decision will deepen the economic crisis threatening Hong Kong which hosts 3,500 HQ offices for companies in the Far East.

"The whole banking and financial structure rests on travel through the region," one analyst said.

The fear now felt by a wide section of the population was expressed by one resident of Amoy Gardens who described how he, his wife and two school-age daughters now lead separate lives - for safety's sake. Transmission of the virus within families is a frequent mode of spread.

"We eat in separate rooms. We do everything separately. We only take off our face masks when each of us is in a room by ourselves. My daughters are especially careful because they don't want me and my wife to get the disease," the man said.

Dr David Heymann, executive director for communicable diseases at WHO, said the travellers from Hong Kong who developed SARS included tourists and business people who had all visited the city since March 15 when other countries had seen control measures designed to curb the disease start to work.

But in Hong Kong new infections among travellers were still occurring, the latest on March 25, which posed a risk to the rest of the world. In addition, there was the puzzle of Amoy Gardens, where more than 100 people in one tower block have been infected, which remained unexplained and suggested some new vehicle of, possibly more rapid, transmission.

"We do not believe this is the air. We believe it is something else in the environment. It is possibly an object people are touching (such as lift buttons) or possibly a sewage system or water system," Dr Heymann said.

The WHO has a book of international travel and health in which it recommends to travellers which health dangers to look out for and which vaccines or drugs to take to avoid them.

"This is the first time we have recommended people avoid an area and this is because we do not understand the disease completely, because there's no vaccine and no drug," Dr Heymann added.

The WHO advice to "postpone travel until another time" also applies to the Guangdong province of mainland China, across the border from Hong Kong, which yesterday declared 361 new cases of SARS and 9 deaths during the month of March. The latest figures cast doubt on earlier Chinese claims that the epidemic had "peaked" in Guangdong, and brought the total to 1,153 cases and 40 deaths since last November.

But there was widespread scepticism yesterday at the low incidence of SARS in the rest of China, numbering no more than two dozen cases reported, and anger at the WHO's decision to impose restrictions on Hong Kong and Guangdong while allowing free movement elsewhere in the region.

As the WHO delivered its body blow, the Swiss Government followed with an uppercut when it declared Hong Kong traders would be banned from the World Jewellery and Watch Fair in Basle today. Hong Kong is the largest supplier of watches in the world and the Basle fair is the biggest.

SARS has so far infected more than 2,000 people but caused just 71 deaths, raising questions as to whether it is as bad as it is feared. The most public capitulation yesterday to the growing panic was that of top jockey Eric St Martin who left Hong Kong with his wife and family for the safety of his native France.

"For three weeks I have been fighting with my wife over this, she has been in tears every day. I want stay and I think it is going to get better but it has not. You cannot live your life like this. My children cannot go to school, they cannot play outside. What happens if this gets worse and worse? Do we die here?"

- INDEPENDENT