Marc Flemming
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At least 4,000 Beijing residents with exposure to a contagious respiratory disease are being kept in isolation, often in their own homes, health authorities said today, and a second major hospital was put under total quarantine, with virtually no one allowed to enter or leave.
City education officials also revealed that 300 college students who had contact with infected people suffering the dangerous new disease. known as SARS, have been sequestered in a military training camp for two weeks' observation.
As Beijing began a stringent new quarantine program to try to halt the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome, pledging to isolate virus-exposed people and contaminated buildings, reported SARS cases in the capital continued to surge for the fifth straight day.
One hundred and three more patients were confirmed as of Thursday evening, taking the city's reported total to 877.
Equally ominous, experts said, was the relentless climb in suspected SARS cases in the city, to 954 as of Thursday night compared with fewer than 700 a few days back. Officials have not said what portion of suspected cases turn out to be SARS.
But the parallel rise in numbers indicates that the epidemic is still worsening in Beijing and also spells an overwhelming load for hospitals and medical workers, who must treat all the cases with the same extraordinary precautions.
In the huge southern city of Shanghai, which has reported only two confirmed and 18 suspected cases of SARS, a team from the World Health Organization said today that some adjustment upwards in statistics will be necessary as the city adopts international definitions of the illness. But the team did not suggest that major undercounting has occurred, as it found last week in Beijing.
Why Shanghai, which is far closer to the SARS epicenter of Guangdong, has had such a light burden is so far a mystery.
This morning Beijing officials held the first of what they promised would be frequent press briefings on an epidemic that has suddenly become a consuming threat and popular obsession.
Cai Fuchao, Beijing's propaganda chief, condemned as pernicious rumors the widely repeated claim that air and road links to the city will be cut or that martial law will be imposed.
"Beijing has ample food," he also declared, vowing to punish vendors caught increasing prices as worried residents buy up rice, noodles and other groceries.
Mr. Cai said that hundreds of inspectors are visiting 147 city hospitals to insure that disease reports are accurate. But international health officials complain that Beijing has still not provided details about where the virus has appeared within the city and among what groups — information that is vital for defeating the disease and assessing risks to the general public.
Only after he was cornered by frustrated reporters did a city health official provide a sketchy picture of quarantines so far. Some 4,000 residents with exposure to SARS patients are in isolation, many of them in their own homes, said Guo Jiyong, deputy director of the Beijing health bureau. It was not clear whether that number included the staff and patients now sequestered in two hospitals and officials did not reveal how many apartment blocks, factories or other buildings had been quarantined.
Beijing's train stations were crowded again today, mainly with well-dressed college students carrying knapsacks and less-polished migrants from rural areas carrying their belongings in grain sacks.
Despite an order that college students should not leave the city without permission, many were boarding trains for their home provinces, in the belief that dormitories in Beijing might be more dangerous. Migrant workers in protective masks said they were going home either out of fear or because work, especially in hotels and restaurants, was drying up.
"I think the disease is a little less bad back home in Henan," one departing plumber said.
On Thursday the city essentially closed down the People's Hospital of Beijing University after dozens of doctors and nurses inside reportedly showed possible signs of SARS. More than 2,000 employees of the hospital and an unknown number of patients are forbidden to leave as the facilities are decontaminated and those inside observed for telltale symptoms.
Today the hospital was still ringed by tape and the police, while trucks delivered boxes of fruit and other foods and some people tried to talk through the fence with healthy relatives stuck inside.
A second facility, Ditan Hospital, which is one of the prime hospitals treating SARS patients, was also closed off today, for reasons that were not disclosed.
But at You'an Hospital, another prime SARS treatment center, only the medical staff in the infectious disease wing were being sequestered and the atmosphere outside, and in adjacent compounds housing hospital staff, seemed relaxed.
"If anyone here gets a fever they'll be isolated, but it hasn't happened yet," said a woman from the residents' committee of one apartment block.
Since Monday, Beijing education authorities have been sending college students with possible SARS exposure to a military training camp, normally used to train students each fall, in Daxing County, just south of the city. About 300 students are held there right now, said a Mr. Zhang of the Beijing Education Commission, in a telephone interview.
Another 50 students sent to the camp from People's University bolted after complaining of poor living conditions. They are now living in a building on the People's University campus.
Cases in universities and schools have not been publicized, but the Web page of the Beijing Northern Transportation University said today that of 52 teachers, other staff members and students sent ill to hospitals, 14 had been confirmed to have SARS and another 9 are suspected of it.
Nationwide, according to data released this evening by the Ministry of Health, China has recorded 2,601 SARS cases, including 115 deaths, with the disease now appearing in 21 provinces and municipalities.
Source: NY Times
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04-25-2003 06:01 PM
