Nature's terrorism strangles Hong Kong

Not much shakes Hong Kong's brash self-confidence. By night its skyscrapers still beam their corporate logos defiantly across the harbour at the Chinese mainland.

The bars on Hong Kong island still pulsate with big, balding expatriates and slinky, diminutive Asian girls.

But there is an edge to the partying, and a gallows humour that fends off fears of what tomorrow may bring. This is a city struggling to quell a rising sense of panic.

The lethal pneumonia virus that is advancing through the population of Hong Kong shows no sign of retreat. Yesterday saw the biggest one-day rise in cases, with 92 new victims as the city authorities announced draconian powers to curb its spread.

Amoy Gardens, a poor housing estate of Soviet-style, 30-storey tower blocks near Kowloon Bay, has seen 213 cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) since the outbreak began a month ago, 107 of them in Block E, which was yesterday placed in quarantine under powers first used by the British over a century ago to control the plague.

White-coated officials wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves gathered at the entrance to the block, sorting ration parcels containing rice, toothpaste and disinfectant from a supermarket.

The 264 families will be confined to their tiny apartments until midnight on April 9 under the order made by Health Secretary Yeoh Eng-Kiong.

Like a modern leper colony, Block E residents will be brought three meals a day but no one can enter or leave the building without written permission from a health officer.

One young couple showed what many residents felt by stalking silently off the estate, arm-in-arm, after rebuffing officials.

Only 120 families have registered their presence in the block and many have already left for safer neighbourhoods - raising accusations that the authorities acted too late, allowing fleeing residents to spread the disease.

But the true significance of Amoy Gardens is much more worrying. Until now, public health experts and the World Health Organisation have stressed that transmission of the virus has been confined to those in "close contact" with an infected person - family members or health workers.

Amoy Gardens provides the first evidence of community spread - suggesting that the virus could be airborne.

If so, the rate of infection could accelerate. Doctors believe the virus was brought to the estate by a man who had visited his infected brother four times in the Prince of Wales Hospital, before victims were placed in isolation.

"We are completely baffled by Amoy Gardens," said WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley.

"The affected families are all on one side of Block E. Did they all get in the same lift? Was the virus on the lift buttons? Was it on the pipes or dripping from the air-conditioning?

"It is worrying. When you get families on different floors infected you don't know what is going on."

Julie Gerberding, director of the US Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, said her team was "carefully monitoring" the possibility of airborne transmission.

"The potential for infecting large numbers of people is very great. We may be in the early stages of a much larger problem," she said.

Hong Kong is struggling to maintain a sense of normality. Every fourth person on the streets is wearing a surgical mask, schools are closed, companies have sent staff home, flights have been cancelled and usually packed markets and squares are deserted.

Although the number of deaths - 55 out of more than 1500 cases - is no higher than for influenza, it is the unknown nature of the threat that has gripped this city.

It is the disease with no name - nature's terrorism.

- INDEPENDENT