April 10, 2003
You’an Hospital, Beijing, China
3,110 Infected, 303 Dead
HUANG YONG CHUGGED DOWN A BOTTLE OF BEIJING SPRING BEER AND lit a cigarette. He had parked on the street in front of the You’an and decided to finish his brew before “bombing” this croak house. I knew that the Wall Street Journal, among other publications, had ordered reporters to steer clear of these hospitals and was having them take extreme precautions in covering this disease. This was something of a moral dilemma that I dealt with by offering our reporters an opt-out clause on all SARS coverage. Huang Yong shrugged when asked whether he thought these “bombing” runs were dangerous. He would pull on his black leather car coat and say, “Oh, I think I’ll be fine.” And fortified by a few beers, he didn’t hesitate to venture into what would turn out to be some of the most dangerous hospital wards in Beijing. While I worried for his safety, I admired him for his courage and desperately wanted to publish his discoveries.
The excitement of Susan Jakes’s scoop with Dr. Jiang’s letter had inspired Huang and awakened in him some competitive zeal. Also, this was among the first stories he had worked on since joining TIME where he felt that something greater than the reputation of a newsweekly was at stake. If this epidemic had, as the great infectious-disease reporter Laurie Garrett had put it, “only just begun,” then the well-being of China—not the government that Huang didn’t give a shit about, but the people whom he loved—might be at grave risk. By getting slightly buzzed and poking around in Beijing hospital wards, Huang was performing, he believed, a great patriotic duty.
Still, nothing could have prepared him for what he found. In an aged and run-down hospital ward, crammed in two to a room, were dozens of patients. “Every single one of us in this building,” a nurse infected with SARS named Zhang would tell him, “is a SARS patient.” The patients were sprawled on dirty sheets, catatonic, fighting for their lives. “There are at least a hundred patients here, several hundred,” said the nurse. “Conditions here are really bad. We’re not allowed out of this room. We piss in this room, crap in this room, and eat in this room. At least half the patients here are doctors and nurses from other hospitals.”
Huang Yong had expected lies; he had not expected the cover-up to be over a plague severe enough to wipe out Beijing. This was the charnel house that we all had feared was out there, like the vast open-air Atlanta mausoleum of Gone With the Wind transplanted to central Beijing.
Huang steeled himself and continued walking through the wards. He regretted not wearing a surgical mask yet felt obligated to continue his journalistic rounds. Another nurse in a surgical mask and gown stopped him. “Look, I’m not pushing you away. I do this for your own good,” she explained. “It’s too dangerous here. It’s really a terrible disease; even we who work here don’t know when we’ll get it. No place is safe in this hospital. All of these wards are full of SARS patients. There are over one hundred at least. Don’t believe the government—they never tell the truth. They say it’s a deadly disease with four percent mortality? Are you kidding me? The death rate is at least twenty-five percent. In this hospital alone, there are over ten patients dead already.”
“Never believe what the Health Ministry tells you,” warned Nurse Zhang as Huang Yong left the hospital.
Huang would crack open another brew in his car and chug down almost half of it before driving back to the bureau. When he arrived, he walked into Susan’s office to report what he had seen. He had a smile on his face.
It was all true, he related to her, every one of those awful rumors. He had not only confirmed them; he had seen it all for himself.
And, he would tell me later, he had never felt so alive.
“This is the hospital ward China’s Ministry of Health doesn’t want you to see,” began Time’s coverage that week, written by Hannah Beech and reported by Huang Yong and Susan Jakes. “According to the Chinese government, most of these patients—and perhaps hundreds or even thousands of others across the nation—simply do not exist…. Numerous reports from local doctors over the past week suggest that the nation’s health-care system remains hostage to a government that values power and public order before human lives.”