April 1, 2003
Amoy Gardens, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
2,119 Infected, 243 Dead
“ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING CONSEQUENCES OF THE CLOSING OF the gates,” wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, “was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it.” An isolation order for the residents of Block E had been in effect for ten days, given by Dr. Margaret Chan and enforced, in theory, by the Hong Kong police. The reality, however, was that many residents continued to come and go. As to why the residents were not officially quarantined, Margaret Chan would later explain that authorities were worried that panicked residents of Block E would go underground. “As it was, we stopped using the lifts, started using the less frequently traveled exits,” according to resident Alice Yuen.
Meanwhile, cleaning crews in biosafety suits arrived and began swabbing every surface of the building—floors, walls, and ceilings—with a bleach solution, forcing the residents to wait in the common areas as they did so. “We had to pay for that ourselves,” said Aswin Chan, of the management company that ran Amoy Gardens. “The government wouldn’t even take responsibility.”
Finally, as public health officials became aware of the environmental risk posed by Amoy Gardens—whatever had caused the rapid rate of infection was most likely related to something in the buildings themselves—they ordered an evacuation. For Block E, the notice of evacuation was made at 6:00 P.M., when the newscasters on Jade TV announced the residents had three hours to pack up and go. “By the time it happened, we were actually grateful,” said Ivan Yuen. “We knew there were at least eighty cases. And since we lived on the twentieth floor, we felt like we were watching the disease go up each floor every day. There would be cases on the eighth floor, then the ninth, then the twelfth. It seemed like a matter of time.” Public health officials would come in for harsh criticism for forcing hundreds of residents to flee by giving them three hours’ notice. Yet the other option—a quick and sudden midnight roundup—would have smacked even more of authoritarianism, and was possibly illegal.
Residents were assured that they would be bused to a “safe, hygienic environment.” Indeed, the camps that the Department of Health had prepared for the evacuees were the bucolically named Lady MacLehose Holiday Village and Lei Yue Mun Park and Holiday Village, vacation spots constructed during the colonial era to provide low-budget holidays for civil servants. Despite the promise of vacations in the sun, hundreds of residents took the opportunity to break quarantine and flee, leaving police to ask their neighbors for any possible contact information. The impression of those potential SARS cases slipping through the net contributed to Hong Kong’s mounting sense of panic.
As the ten sixty-seat minibuses were loaded, camera crews and newspaper reporters gathered to watch the embarkation as if these were adventurers embarking on some sort of expedition. Cantonese reporters shouted across barricade lines to the bewildered evacuees pulling roller bags. Relatives sought a glimpse of their kin. Once loaded on the buses, the evacuees had to wait for several hours as police closed the roads along the intended route. This seemed the first of what were sure to be more drastic measures.
WHILE I COULD SEE AMOY GARDENS FROM MY OFFICE WINDOW, I could not make it out through the haze from my apartment up on The Peak. The gulf between those of us at this elevation and those living in Amoy Gardens was economic, social, and now, it seemed, virological. Those in the housing estates on the Kowloon side were far more likely to catch SARS than those of us living in tony neighborhoods like The Peak. It was statistical fact. All the apartment complexes where there were clusters of cases—Telford Garden, Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate—were in Kowloon. Cases on Hong Kong Island were scattered and infrequent, and tended to affect health care workers who had a clear source of infection in a hospital.
To cling to the notion of class or wealth as somehow providing a cordon sanitaire from SARS would be as preposterous as London’s medieval nobility believing the poor were more likely to suffer from plague. It seemed that the crowded Amoy Gardens was merely the logical first wave of virological attack. The disease would strike there first because of the higher concentration of susceptible immune systems; but a contagious disease should eventually find its way to every fetid alley and gilded parlor of this city. I thought of that scene at the end of the 1968 black-and-white film Night of the Living Dead in which the few surviving uninfected humans are holed up in a house atop a hill. The scourge was coming; it had to be. The only way to keep it away, one fellow journalist announced, was to lock your doors, load a shotgun, and shoot anyone who tried to get in. From up here on The Peak, I imagined I could watch the spread of the infection from Amoy Gardens, down Jordan to Tsim Sha Tsui, across Victoria Harbor by ferry, where hundreds of thousands disembarked in Central. From there, the virus was a taxi or tram ride up the hill and down Barker Road and into my kitchen, and then my children’s bedroom.
It always comes down to them, doesn’t it? The children. We project our fears onto them. Our worry is not for ourselves, for our own lungs, but for the precious children. Thus far, statistics coming out of Hong Kong’s hospitals were noting a remarkably low rate of infection among children. It was postulated that their underdeveloped immune systems did not respond to the virus as aggressively as an adult’s immune system, with the result that an infected child might show no symptoms at all and never fall ill, though he or she might still be contagious. But in China, anecdotal evidence had presented a different picture. There, the virus had been a more equal-opportunity killer. Though the elderly and decrepit had fallen ill at a greater rate than the youthful and healthy, there had been tragic cases of preteens, teens, and twentysomethings passing away.
My daughters refused to wear the face masks we had adopted as almost good-luck totems to ward off the disease. Public health officials would privately acknowledge that the masks, as they were applied by most citizens, offered little or no protection. Yet in press conferences, these officials were reluctant to strip away this last line of psychological defense.
Air traffic into and out of Hong Kong had already come to a virtual standstill. The 301 flights per day that usually left the territory had already been cut by two-thirds, primarily because there was so little demand for flights into Hong Kong that airlines didn’t have the planes to fly out. The projected damage to Hong Kong’s economy was five billion U.S. dollars, and growth rates for 2003 were already being revised downward by one to two percentage points. The city itself was remarkably desolate. Shops were forlorn. You could walk into any restaurant in town and be seated at a table of your choosing. I recall dining one night at Vong, the usually crowded fusion restaurant on the top floor of the Mandarin Hotel, and finding myself the only patron in the whole joint; the service was impeccable. Gradually, most restaurants were shuttered up as the owners found no reason to stay open and empty every day. “Hong Kong now looks like a city under threat of a biological weapons attack,” wrote Jim Erickson in Time. It was eerily quiet, and I could make the drive from my apartment to my office—usually a twenty-minute ride—in about seven minutes.
If I was concerned about the continued good health of my family, I also had to consider the well-being of my staff. We really didn’t have any plan for running the office through an infectious-disease outbreak—who does? What if the building were quarantined? We had reporters constantly going in and out of hospital wards and infected provinces in China. One of them could easily return from a reporting trip and then, a few days later, after passing the virus along to a few co-workers, start to show symptoms. That would result in the quarantining of my staff, the closing of our offices, and, effectively, the shutting down of Time Asia. That had already happened to one floor of PCCW, the local phone company. We needed a contingency plan.
What precautions were my colleagues at other Hong Kong publications taking? I called John Bussey, who oversaw both the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He relayed to me the remarkable measures Dow Jones was implementing to ensure that they had backup systems in place in the event of a viral cataclysm. They had decided to keep over half the staff at home, working in isolation, so that there would be no risk of the whole staff being quarantined. “It’s all about backup,” Bussey explained. “We now have it set up so that we could do the entire magazine by remote, if necessary.”
He went on to say that he was looking into producing the newspaper out of a satellite office. “You know,” he added, “particles from a human sneeze travel eighteen feet.” Then he asked, “What have you guys done?”
“Um…” I felt pathetically inadequate. “Um, all that stuff you guys have done. Plus, we’re looking into a few more contingency plans.”
“It’s all about backup,” Bussey said. “Let me know if you have any good ideas.”
Perhaps, I thought, there was someone higher up the Time Warner organizational chart in Asia who had formulated a plan. The only person I could think of was Steve Marcopoto, the president of CNN in Hong Kong. It turned out that he and his family were back in the United States and would stay there for most of that SARS season. I called one of my counterparts at CNN and was told that they hadn’t really thought much about the matter, but they would be happy to hear what we were doing. It dawned on me that no one at the company had a plan for how to manage through this disease outbreak. “Nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this city,” Daniel Defoe had written in Journal of the Plague Year, “than the supine negligence of the people themselves.”
Determined not to repeat the folly of Defoe’s Londoners, I did what managers everywhere do when they are out of ideas: I convened a meeting.
We gathered in a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor. A few of us were wearing surgical masks; others ignored the superstition. For those who wore glasses, the masks caused condensation to build up behind the lenses, which could be cleared only by pulling off their masks for a moment or two, thereby rendering totally moot any theoretical benefit. I was reassured that the likelihood that any of us around this table had been exposed to possible SARS cases was minimal. We were the management class, in charge of marketing, finance, human resources, and production; no one here could have the disease, could they?
But a few minutes into the meeting, as I suggested that we send out a companywide memo saying that anyone who had come into contact with a possible SARS case should stay away from the office, it became clear that everyone in the room already knew someone who might be infected. In fact, our circulation manager had dined the evening before in Amoy Gardens, at her father-in-law’s. Another woman said that her sister was in quarantine. The meeting quickly grew quiet as we realized that enforcing such an order would mean virtually shutting down the office.
“It doesn’t matter, as far as we are concerned,” said Ivy Choi, a vice president of advertising sales. “None of our clients want to meet anyway. Everyone is too frightened.”
Throughout the region, businesses were shunning face-to-face meetings. There wasn’t much reason for our business side to report to work anyway. We decided that anyone who could work from home, should. Furthermore, there would be disinfectant cleaning of the entire office, as well as the procurement of antibacterial soap, surgical masks, gloves, and alcohol swabs.
As soon as I was back in my office, a young female employee came to me and explained that her father-in-law had been hospitalized with SARS, and she had just read in the paper that all family contacts of SARS cases should themselves see a doctor for a health check.
“You should really be wearing a mask,” I told her.
My reasoning for employees’ wearing masks in the office was not so the person wearing it would be protected, but so that anyone infected would not be so contagious. That was the rationale given for the precaution in Japan, where similar surgical masks are commonly worn in winter by anyone with a head cold.
The employee said she would. I told her she had to go home immediately and see a doctor.
Then another junior Chinese staffer entered and said that she had to go to Guangdong urgently. “I’m worried about my aunt and uncle,” she explained. “I’ve been calling them, and I don’t know if they are infected or not.”
Perhaps, I suggested, visiting Guangdong, the likely epicenter of the whole outbreak, was not a good idea.
“I can’t stay here.”
“Why?”
“My apartment building is so dirty,” she said. “It looks like those buildings where they have SARS.”
“But still, going up to Guangdong right now isn’t going to be any safer.”
She sat down on my sofa and began sobbing. “That is so racist.”
She was crying and accusing me of discrimination. I suspected this was one of those situations that, if handled incorrectly, would have me labeled as a lousy boss.
I had both to console her and somehow deflect her charges; I am also half Asian and thus an unlikely source for anti-Asian bias.
“These are stressful times,” I told her. “Very nerve-racking for all of us. We’re going to have most of the staff work from home. Why don’t you work from home?”
She continued her demur, sniffling, “I told you, I don’t feel safe in my flat.”
“But you would feel safer in China?”
She nodded.
“But—”
“You think all Chinese are infected,” she said. “You gwielos [foreigners] think we are all sick.”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that there is a WHO advisory against visiting Guangdong.”
“You think Hong Kong is any safer?” she asked. “The WHO has also advised against visiting Hong Kong.”
I couldn’t console her. “Just try to take it easy. Don’t go running off to China just yet.”
I let her sit a moment on my office sofa as I pretended to be busy with some papers on my desk.
“Okay?” I said, trying to indicate that our meeting was over. I had to add some blandishment about how seriously we took the health and safety of our employees. “You know, I care about you and want you to stay healthy.”
She looked at me blankly.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a mask?” I added. It seemed such paltry defense against this virological agent, but what else did we have? We were now living in a city that the World Health Organization had advised against visiting.
OUR REPORTERS IN HONG KONG, GUANGZHOU, BEIJING, SHANGHAI, and Singapore who were visiting hospitals had already been told to quarantine themselves in hotel rooms rather than return to their families. They would work by remote, we decided. We kept one art director out of the office. One of our editors happened to be in New Delhi, where I told him to stay until further notice. My deputy editor, William Green, and I decided that he would work from home, thereby ensuring that one of us would escape quarantine if our offices were shut down. A photo editor who was visiting Tokyo was told to stay there. Half the Hong Kong office staff were told to clear out. We also arranged for a system by which the European edition could transmit directly to our printing plants in the event that we had to completely evacuate the Hong Kong offices and somehow prepare a magazine from London.
It all made some sort of sense on paper, but in reality I knew that if the virus really burned through Hong Kong, as it seemed was possible, then putting out a magazine was probably the least of my concerns. As I walked down the street to the Wellcome supermarket to pick up some disinfectant soap, I was surprised to see a throng around the electronic doors beneath the red-and-yellow sign. There was a crowd filing into the market and an even denser line backed up behind the registers, with shopping carts piled high with cooking oil, rice, toilet paper, and virtually anything else that could be deemed a necessity. Dodging shopping carts, I walked up and down the aisles, noticing that the rice was sold out, as were the eggs, cooking oil, canned soups, ramen noodles, toilet paper, most of the chili paste, oyster sauce, and even the garlic. There was still some cereal, although the Weetabix and cornflakes were in short supply. Count Chocula, for some reason, had survived the run on the supermarket.
Soap had been cleaned out as well, along with most over-the-counter medications and, for some reason, Band-Aids and gauze bandages. What was going on here?
“Quarantine,” one woman said to me.
“Infected port,” said another.
I was astonished. It had finally happened. Hong Kong had been declared an infected port. There had been rumors to this effect for days. The WHO, or the Chinese government, would declare the city an infected port and ban all travel in and out, therefore implementing a blockade and curtailing trade. There would be shortages. We would be trapped in a starving city. I looked around. There was still plenty of wine for sale.
I took out my mobile phone to call the office. There was a text message on my phone from PCCW, my service provider. The Hong Kong government was assuring all mobile phone subscribers that Hong Kong had not been quarantined and was not an infected port. Then why the run on the market? It turned out that a fourteen-year-old schoolboy had posted a bogus Internet article about SARS under a fake banner from the Chinese-language newspaper Mingpao, claiming that Hong Kong had been declared an infected port, that border checkpoints had been closed, and that citizens had been ordered to stay home. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Tung, the hacker’s message went on to say, would soon be appearing at an emergency press conference to announce the restrictions in light of the fact that “the outbreak is out of control.”
The Hang Sang stock index had plunged one hundred points upon release of the news, and in addition to the run on supermarkets and pharmacies, ATMs and bank branches had run out of cash. It took several hours for the government to figure out what was going on and to get a televised statement from Director of Health Margaret Chan onto the air, reassuring Hong Kong that this had been an April Fool’s hoax.
In the midst of this tangled urban tragedy, actor Leslie Cheung, the openly gay and very popular Canto-crooner and star of such films as Farewell My Concubine and Happy Together, killed himself by leaping from the twenty-fourth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Leslie Cheung had been a beloved Hong Kong presence, his cheerful, perpetual boyishness making him a mascot of the city’s nightlife. Just in case we needed any more signs, Leslie Cheung’s suicide was confirmation for many of us that the good times were officially over.
REMARKABLY, IN THE RAREFIED WORLD OF THE PEAK, NO ONE HAD heard of the hoax. Yet the news of Amoy Gardens and the sense that the virus was now at large in the community had finally compelled most of our friends to leave Hong Kong. Wives and children were fleeing en masse, and those husbands who could were going to work in offices in Tokyo or Sydney. The outbreak now seemed to be entering a fraught new phase. The hoax had vividly brought home to me the rattled nerves of this population and the often irrational responses that disease outbreaks elicit. The first phase of a disease, I had read, is denial. The second is panic. The third, if we are lucky, is rational response. Perhaps we were now in the second phase. Who knew when the blessedly scientific third phase would kick in?
My wife had been determined to stay in Hong Kong, not wanting to squander our precious home-leave allowance on a trip of this nature. But the prior evening, Jim Kelly, my immediate boss in New York and the managing editor of Time in the United States, had told me to to send my family and those of my staff who desired back to their home countries. (I would expand this directive to include local employees who wanted to send their husbands, wives, or children out of Hong Kong, even though Hong Kong was their home.) So, with the company picking up the plane tickets, I convinced my wife, Silka, to leave Hong Kong with the kids. She logged on to the Internet and began seeking possible destinations, not wanting to return to her native Netherlands for an indefinite period of time. Seeking to make the best of a bad situation, she decided to visit Sri Lanka, and even persuaded a friend of ours, Juliette, to join her with her two children. Silka arranged to rent a villa for two weeks just outside Galle. Sri Lanka, I was pleased to note, was one of the few countries in Asia that had yet to report a SARS case.
That evening, I took my wife and daughters to the airport, where we met Juliette, her husband Peter, and their two sons. The cavernous Norman Foster–designed Chek Lap Kok Airport was all but abandoned; I would later recall the absurdity of its monumental scale when just a half dozen passengers were using the entire Superdome-size Departures area. There were so few people waiting to check in at the counters that the usual pylons delineating the queues had been removed. There had been much public conjecture regarding the safety of air travel during this outbreak. Most airplanes recycled as much as four-fifths of the air on long flights, and though they supposedly filtered the air, the process would not screen virus particles. This meant that if someone on a plane had SARS, then you would almost definitely inhale some portion of air that that person had exhaled. Already, the WHO had identified flights in which there appeared to have been multiple transmissions of SARS. On a March 15 Air China flight from Hong Kong to Beijing, twenty-three passengers had been infected by a seventy-two-year-old man. Remarkably, the WHO would learn, some of the victims had sat as far as seven rows away from him. That one infected flight had set off a chain reaction of infection, with two flight attendants ending up hospitalized in Inner Mongolia and two trade officials flying to Bangkok infected, one of them ending up hospitalized. When that patient flew back to Beijing a week later, he infected a Finnish man who would himself pass away. Air China claimed to have contacted most of the patients on these flights, but the two stewardesses, two of the easiest patients to trace, told Indira Lakshmanan of the Boston Globe that they had not been warned. In fact, Air China would continue to inform passengers of flight CA 112 that it was “good news…the SARS patient did not fly on our airline.” Yet it would be flight CA 112 that would seed Inner Mongolia’s SARS outbreak of more than three hundred cases.
The only passengers at the airport that day were other wives and children being sent abroad by their husbands. We stood at the entrance to Passport Control waving as our families disappeared through the sliding doors. After they left, Peter and I drank coffee at the Pacific Coffee stand and watched CNN as U.S. troops rolled on toward Baghdad.
I would not see my wife and children again for over a month.