April 3, 2003
302 Hospital, Western Beijing, China
2,486 Infected, 275 Dead
HUANG YONG, THE REPORTER ATTACHED TO THE TIME BEIJING BUREAU, had been sent by his bureau chief, Matthew Forney, to drop in to a few local hospitals and discreetly see if any of the doctors, nurses, or support staff would talk about atypical pneumonia cases, or “A pneumonia,” as the disease was being called in Beijing. Huang was often the reporter we would turn to because of his gift for speaking to bureaucrats and blending in with Chinese peasants and proletarians when that was required. Since he spent much of his time at roadside cafés drinking a few beers, Huang would artfully combine that activity with conversation with a few locals to verify rumors. In this case, he walked straight into the hospital—at Time, we would come to call this legally and medically risky practice “bombing” hospitals—and strolled up and down the hallways. The physicians and nurses, he immediately noticed, were all wearing N-95 masks. On later bombing runs, he would carry a bouquet of flowers as a prop. For this trip, he simply began strolling around and asking different doctors if they had any of these dreaded “A pneumonia” cases in the wards. Sure, he was told, they had a few. And they had referred a few cases to 309 Hospital as well.
“How many of these patients do you have?” Huang Yong asked.
“About fifteen,” a doctor told him.
That was strange. Fifteen cases. In this one hospital? In all of Beijing, according to the Ministry of Health, there were only a dozen cases.
He strolled back out, stopping to talk to the shopkeeper who ran the snack and newspaper kiosk near the entrance gate. He casually asked how many pneumonia patients she had heard about.
She shrugged. “Dozens.”
For the generation that had left their lives at Tiananmen, it was no leap to assume the government would lie. Huang Yong’s generation believed that every government—of the United States or China—played with the truth. But shouldn’t they be more thorough in their prevarication? If a reporter working for a foreign magazine could stumble upon evidence contradictory to what a government minister was, at that exact moment, probably saying at a meeting or press conference somewhere in Beijing, then that meant the lie had to be so big it could not possibly hide the truth. Which meant the truth had to be so terrifying that it necessitated a lie that had no chance of actually succeeding. Huang returned to his little hatchback and pulled out onto the Fourth Ring Road, sipping his beer while he drove. He followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion: the disease was already here, and not only was it here, it was doing so much damage that the leadership was panicking. The bigger the lie, the more horrible the truth. He pulled in to the parking lot at Ditan Hospital, also known as the Beijing Prevention and Treatment Center for Viral Infectious Diseases. He slipped on his gauze mask and walked up to the registration desk and asked, “Do you have a respiratory department here?”
“What’s your problem?” the nurse standing behind the counter asked.
“Lung disease,” he answered.
She jumped back a full meter and covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “Go to the emergency ward.”
Huang laughed and went to the elevator bank. At the emergency ward, he strolled toward the nurses’ station in the middle of an open suite of ICU theaters. There were dozens of patients in critical condition. The nurses wore N-95 masks and appeared to be busy behind the counter.
“I think my mother is here,” Huang said.
“Who is she?” asked a nurse seated behind a desk.
“We call her Granny Hu,” he said. “She has atypical pneumonia.”
“She’s one of a dozen,” the nurse said.
By the time Huang returned to the TIME bureau offices in the Jianguomen diplomatic compound, he had visited one more hospital, in which he had heard of ten more cases. That made at least thirty-seven cases, while the official tally was still only a dozen.
Matt Forney called me to talk about Huang Yong’s reporting.
“You may be right about the government hiding cases,” he conceded.
Huang got on the phone, and we talked about what he had seen. I was eager to try to get something onto our website or into the magazine on this subject, and I pointed out that if, in the first three hospitals Huang walked into he had found dozens of infected patients, then who knew how many more there were throughout Beijing?
Forney, when he came back on the line, agreed that there was something to this, but then he raised a valid point: Huang Yong was not a doctor or a scientist, and our criteria of what constituted a SARS case could be different from the government’s.
It was a legitimate issue. What would happen if we ran a story about Beijing hiding cases, and it turned out these were not SARS cases but some other pneumonia? More likely, if the government came out and said we were wrong, how could we refute them? We didn’t have virus growing in cell lines. We didn’t have a doctor backing us up.
“We need a whistle-blower,” Matt said, making a reference to Time magazine’s Persons of the Year in 2002—Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Sherron Watkins of Enron, and Coleen Rowley of the FBI—who brought to light the big corporate and government scandals of the previous year.
We both knew how unlikely it was that anyone in China would be willing to take that sort of risk.