China Quarantines Thousands on SARS Fears.
By John Pomfret.
Washington Post Foreign Service.
Thursday, April 24, 2003; 1:23 PM.

BEIJING, April 24--Police and health department personnel began a massive program to quarantine thousands of residents, homes, factories and school buildings in Beijing today as China's government sought to stop the SARS epidemic.

Scores of police officers and a squad of the People's Armed Police, wearing facemasks, fanned out around the sprawling confines of Beijing's People's Hospital today, wrapping it in yellow police tape and locking 2,000 health care personnel and patients inside. The facility is believed to have 70 patients stricken with severe acute respiratory syndrome. The semi-official China News Service said the facility, which is attached to Beijing University, was quarantined because it could not stop SARS from spreading so "it needed to be isolated from the rest of Beijing.

Hundreds of students from schools across Beijing, meanwhile, were dispatched to a quarantine facility in the suburb of Daxing, north of the city, for observation because they had been identified as having contact with people stricken with SARS. The government today acknowledged that 135 students, ranging from university to kindergarten, either had SARS or probably had SARS, according to a spokesman for the Beijing Education Committee. Beijing's Communist Party secretary, Liu Qi, appeared on the nightly new tonight and asked "everybody to understand" the government's need to "isolate buildings, factories, schools and homes.

The government, meanwhile, announced that China's toll in the disease rose to 2,422 infected and 110 dead. Beijing's toll rose by 89 stricken and four dead. Altogether, 774 people have SARS in Beijing and 39 have died. Just last week, the government had been claiming that there were only 37 SARS cases in the capital.

Doctors in the city continued to complain that authorities were not being truthful with the numbers. The government has refused to specify if the infections are new or if the cases had simply not been reported before. Several doctors said they believed the government knows of hundreds more SARS cases but is releasing the numbers slowly in an effort not to cause panic.

"They will let the toll go up and up, about 100 a day, until they get near the real figure," said one respiratory disease specialist, "but I don't think we will ever know how many people really are sick.

In an interview with state-run media, party secretary Liu, who now heads a special task force to deal with SARS, claimed the government's figures were "truthful and reliable.

Compared to Beijing, however, Shanghai appeared "stuck in the dark ages," a Western executive said about China's financial center. The government continues to insist that there are only two SARS cases and no fatalities in the city of 16 million people. One reason is that the city uses a different standard to judge SARS than the rest of China, according to state-run media. Unless a patient actually came from a SARS-infected region, the patient can't be diagnosed as having SARS, the Southern Weekend newspaper reported. The city was forced to close its massive auto show three days ahead of schedule when a reporter from Beijing came to Shanghai with the disease, sources said. Doctors in the city said they have been told to list causes of death other than SARS on death certificates.

A doctor at Renji Hospital in Shanghai said a 50-year-old woman died in early April of SARS but the hospital said it was just pneumonia.

"I had a look at her lung X-ray. It is very obvious she contracted SARS," the doctor said.

Chinese sources said Shanghai's government has enormous influence in Beijing, so it can afford to ignore orders from President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to stop lying about SARS' spread. Three former Shanghai city officials are on the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Communist Party's Politburo and former president Jiang Zemin, who maintains substantial influence, is also the city's former party secretary.

"Shanghai thinks it can do anything it wants in China," said a Communist Party source in Beijing. "The western media and the World Health Organization forced Beijing to be more honest". A WHO team has been in Shanghai for the past four days. "Our team in China has clearly indicated that they feel there are probably more cases in Shanghai than have been reported," said David Heymann, the WHO's executive director for communicable disease, in a statement on the organization's Web site.

In Beijing, panic is happening anyway. A mass exodus from the city continued, as migrant workers, who carry out much of the manual labor in Beijing, fled the capital by road and rail. On one city block, a tailor, all the construction workers, all the waitresses and all the vegetable sellers returned to their homes in the countryside.

Residents mobbed supermarkets around the city, snapping up rice, vegetables, disinfectant and cooking oil. Merchants capitalized on the panic-buying, increasing prices. The price of eggs, for example, almost doubled.

"I'm stocking up," said Liu Hong, a 33-year-old office worker as she waddled with six bags of groceries from a supermarket in western Beijing. "We are spending all our time indoors. It's dangerous outside".

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

