July 1, 2003
Victoria Park, Hong Kong
8,445 Infected, 811 Dead
MY WIFE AND CHILDREN HAD RETURNED FROM THEIR EXILE, AND ON that sultry Sunday, we all went out to the antigovernment protest together, taking a taxi from The Peak and then waiting near Victoria Station for a few other journalists who were planning to march under a banner from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong. The police had allowed for just two entrances to the park, and the Hong Kong government had cynically divided the park, staging a sparsely attended progovernment rally in a vast stretch of soccer pitches next to the protest rally, which was as crowded as a rush-hour subway. For those of us who were protesting, the wait to get into the park was a few hours, and then the march would take ten hours more. What was amazing was how many hundreds of thousands waited in ninety-degree heat to participate.
Six hundred thousand turned out to oppose the imminent passage of legislation calling for Hong Kong to enact measures against treason, secession, sedition, and subversion, measures that would have allowed law enforcement and security officers to take steps against organizations maintaining links with foreign political bodies. Under the legislation as it was written, a news organization that published state secrets could be charged with treason. What worried journalists, civil libertarians, and vast numbers of Hong Kongers was that almost anything deemed sensitive by the central government in Beijing—information about SARS, for example—could be declared a state secret and thus proscribed, putting Hong Kong’s media on the same footing as China’s. In the wake of what Hong Kong had discovered through SARS—that the central government in China would indeed lie about a disease that could kill you—it was increasingly apparent that the implementation of this legislation, called for by Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, could have the worst sort of chilling effect on civil liberties, investigative journalism, and your own immune system. Perhaps in a state where the rule of law did not seem as fragile as in Hong Kong, or as trampled upon as in China, the proscriptions of Article 23 would not have seemed so odious. (There are similar-sounding statutes on the books in the United States, for example.) Yet in the current climate, the article was deemed sufficiently frightening to encourage hundreds of thousands out into the streets in the largest mass protest in Hong Kong history.
Despite the cause for the gathering, the mood was almost festive. Hong Kong had survived the worst, many of us felt. Since 1997, it had had two emerging-virus outbreaks and had suffered more than three hundred fatalities due to these novel diseases. A total of 1,755 Hong Kong residents had been infected with SARS, 1,261 had been put into isolation, 13,300 jobs had been lost, 4,000 businesses had folded, 13,783 flights had been canceled, and a million fewer tourists had come to Hong Kong. The WHO travel advisory had been in effect for fifty-two days. Yet the city had not only survived, it had demonstrated its central role in the globe not only as a financial center but also as an emerging-disease sentinel.
That wasn’t, of course, what most of those would say that day. They were here because of concern over basic freedoms, Hong Kong’s economic stagnation, high unemployment, and feckless government. But the fact that we could gather en masse meant that Hong Kong’s doctors and scientists had done a tremendous job fighting off a killer that had tried to crash our species.
The emergence from the somber season of SARS had been gradual but unmistakable. We watched the numbers of newly infected decline, the ranks of the discharged increase. Those from Amoy Gardens were taken off quarantine. The masks came off. Families returned. The WHO lifted its travel advisory and even scheduled a conference in Kuala Lumpur to discuss how the virus had been beaten in one hundred days.
By the middle of May, we had felt safe enough to hold a fourth-birthday party for my daughter, around the swimming pool of our apartment building. All those precautions of just a few weeks ago now seemed the overly protective measures of hypochondriacs. We still had no idea what to make of SARS, how to put it in context. The world had dodged a viral bullet, but how and why? I was convinced that we had just been lucky. Others, like columnist Nury Vittachi, maintained that we had overreacted all along.
I was chatting with Peter, a former journalist turned corporate communications executive, as we sat around the pool watching our kids dive in and out of water that a few weeks before had been declared off-limits by public health officials. What had happened here was weird, we remarked. This sort of disease scare, this type of panic over an outbreak, was supposed to be reserved for science fiction.
“Maybe this was just some sort of dry run,” Peter suggested. “What if these sorts of panics and scares become regular phenomena? New disease, everyone runs for the hills. The markets just take it in stride, it becomes like another factor in business forecasts.”
I said I would be surprised if mankind ever became unafraid of new diseases. That fear, I pointed out, had been hardwired into us; indeed, it may even have been why we were here, around this pool, evidence of successful genetic lines.
“But what was that?” He shook his head. “It was like we all lost our minds.”
He had a point. Wouldn’t we all have been just as safe if we hadn’t taken any measures? If we had never worn masks or swabbed our floors with bleach or filled our U-pipes? How many Chicken McNuggets had I eaten? And for what?
But that’s how they start. With a few cases in a remote hospital. A doctor treating a patient who just won’t get well. And that patient passes the virus to another patient. And another.