| 22 April 2003 | 2003 4 22
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| 22 April 2003 | 2003422
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I was trying to ignore the rumour last week that there was a SARS case in Dalian. But over the weekend the Chinese government reported several hundred previously undisclosed cases of the disease to the World Health Organisation, including one in my province of Liaoning. If it is in Dalian, that's about 20km from me. Still, one case is hardly a sweeping epidemic, and looking beyond the hype and speculation the facts still don't justify panic, as Mike Leung explains here.
The Health Minister and the Major of Beijing have been sacked now, and my college is taking action too although I don't know from how high up the orders come. Last week notices were posted informing the students about the disease and listing precautions that they should take. We foreign teachers received the same information last Thursday in a meeting with one of the doctors at the college clinic. This advice included washing hands, and opening windows for ventilation. This week, the college supplied all the staff and students with a bar of antiseptic sulfur soap, a thermometer, and a chart on which to record our temperature three times a day.
Since most students live four-to-a-room on campus and eat together in the dining hall, SARS would stand a good chance of spreading if it entered the school. So measures are being taken to make sure it says SARS-free. The guard at the gate wasn't going to let me in this morning, because I couldn't prove that I worked there (two students eventually came by and backed up my story). Students who return from travelling (such as final year students who leave the city for a job interview) will be quarantined in a separate building 24 hours a day for 12 days.
The May Day holiday, usually 7 days long, has been reduced to 3. But I had already decided not to go travelling before I heard that news.
Some of the students are taking it pretty seriously. I spoke to two different people today who want to buy masks, but haven't been able to because the shop was sold out. They're also going to avoid leaving the campus as much as possible. One person I was with tried to cover her mouth with her hand as we walked into the dining hall, but at the same time was trying to avoid touching her face.
I'll take some precautions of course, but I don't want to make myself afraid of every door handle and crowded room. And given the recent cold turn in the weather, I don't plan to go leaving my windows wide open. That sounds like the surest way to get sick!
24 April
As of today, students are not permitted to leave the campus. I've been issued with a gate pass, although to tell the truth I haven't been challenged since that first occasion. Staff and students have also been put on a seven day course of Chinese herbal medicine, a brown liquid that we're supposed to drink twice a day. The students tell me that the taste is horrible! It's not claimed to be a cure, just something to strengthen our bodies' defenses. Various people have encouraged me to use it, but nobody can tell me exactly what it contains. You might say "But Todd, you order things from restaurant menus without knowing what they are!" Nevertheless, I'm going to stick to orange juice, which tastes a lot better anyway.
Every conversation these days seems to start and end with SARS. I try to avoid coughing in earshot of anyone, for fear of panicking them! However, I haven't seen anyone donning a mask in the school yet, apart from one gate sentry and all of the dining hall staff while they're preparing food.
Although I'm playing down the risk of SARS, I do agree that it's something which local governments, schools, etc need to be cautious of. Until more is known about the epidemic, discouraging travel between towns is definitely wise. But I think that thermometers and herbs are overkill. As for the lock-down, I really don't understand the rationale behind it.
I'm not putting my money on this disease as the 21st century's great plague. It does make you wonder though: what if the next virus coming out of Guangdong is a little more contagious and a little more deadly?
30 April
My school is certainly not the only one barring the gates, and teachers are not necessarily exempt from these measures either (as John in Hangzhou reports). The teachers at my college don't live on campus, and apart from providing 10 minutes of healthy exercise walking to and from school this arrangement also guarantees my freedom during these interesting times.
The great SARS overreaction has reached my housing estate. Stairwells are being cleaned with disinfectant twice a day, and residents must apply for photographic ID cards. In reality, pedestrians are not being challenged (yet), but non-local vehicles are being turned away. The fact that all the gates except the main entrance have been locked adds an extra 5 minutes of healthy exercise to my walk.
Actually, there are two more gates that are unlocked, a win for commercial interests since one provides access to the basement shop mentioned in this article, and the other is outside a bone-setters clinic. Walking home tonight, I noticed that an extra fence has been erected so that only the shop is accessible and not the rest of the estate. I also noticed one man calmly walk up to the fence, lift a hinged flap about half a metre high, and climb through.
Despite the lock-down at the college, I hear that a few students have been sneaking over the fence. How many might resort to it after being driven stir-crazy by the three day break for May Day (starting tomorrow)? Linear thinking presents a classic solution to this problem. The teachers have been asked to assemble at 10pm to conduct a check of all the dormitory rooms. After that, they will be posted as guards around the fence line, one every 30 metres, in 20 minute shifts (around the clock?). These orders came down this afternoon, apparently, and the teacher who told me about it was quietly furious about the extremity of the measure, which of course will cost them the long-awaited May Day holiday. Foreign teachers are excluded from this exercise.
2 May
Staff and students now have to wear photographic ID badges at all times, presumably so that disease-carrying outsiders can be quickly identified. Actually, I haven't been issued with a badge yet and I think I almost caused an international incident when the person behind the counter at the school's general store asked me where I lived. At first, I took this to be simple curiosity and I replied "I live outside, in Hongmei estate." Luckily, one of my students happened to overhear, and she quickly intervened to vouch for me being a staff member.
Teachers are guarding the fence in two-hour shifts (not 20 minutes as I reported earlier). Students too are being rostered, a whole class at a time, to patrol stretches of the fenceline. Some are even dressed in army camouflage and carry batons! On the other hand, I spoke to a student who had the 9pm–midnight shift last night, and she said her class spent most of the time skipping rope or kicking a shuttlecock to keep awake.
The penalty for leaving the campus is immediate expulsion, a fate which had already befallen a handful of unlucky students before the beefed-up security measures came into effect (unlucky that their absence was noticed, I mean). However, students with a legitimate reason can apply to leave the campus, and as of recently it is also possible for a whole class to apply for a 3-hour excursion. Tomorrow, one of my classes is going to the seaside, which is within walking distance.
But do these excursions, and the fact that teachers can freely come and go, compromise the principles behind the school's isolation? My personal feeling is that the policy-makers are now so concerned with controlling the students that they've forgotten the reason behind it (protecting them from SARS, if you've forgotten too).
13 May
The new policy was that each class could leave the campus for 3 hours each week. They could go shopping or do whatever they liked during this time, but every student had to be present before the group was let out of the gate, or let in again. Some of the students called it "Fang feng", which means letting prisoners out for exercise. But after little more than a week, this privilege has already been called off after two cases of SARS were reported in Dalian on the weekend. At the top of this article I was musing about a rumour of SARS in Dalian a few weeks ago, but in fact that case turned out to be somewhere else in the province.
I don't know what things are like in Dalian itself, but here in the Development Zone this latest news hasn't incited panic. The disease is starting to lose its shock value after weeks of anti-SARS measures. For those of us not imprisoned in institutions of higher learning, life is returning to normal. Brendan reports a similar sentiment in Ha'erbin.
Comments
We have been keeping up to date with your entries. People's values in other countries can be strange to an outsider. Gill used to say about South Africa "funny country, funny people". Did you know that while we were at Amandelbult there was some concern about black uprisings. We were supposed to keep a bag of emergency rations behind the back door (torch, candles, biltong , water, canned food etc). When there was a signal—a siren would blow a large number of blasts, then we were supposed to deposit any pets in the tennis courts and then proceed to the mine office with families and emergency rations. Our strongest vision was the tennis courts with all manner of traumatised animals locked inside. Fortunately we never even had a practice. A fence was also built around the township, and a road built outside the fence. The fence stopped at the main road—there was a gap, no gate. Apparently a road on the outside was a bad idea, so they remade the road on the inside. And where the blacks normally walked through the velt into the village, the fence was soon able to be lifted up and the blacks able to walk through.