BY JOSEPH BOSCO
(Xiamen, P.R. China)— "Fear of SARS is outrunning SARS," Dr. David Ho, a noted virologist who heads the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, said recently in an interview with Reuters.
"People clearly have reacted to it with a level of fear that is incommensurate with the size of the problem and I think it is getting in the way of a reasonable response," is how David Baltimore, a leading AIDS researcher who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine, explained his concerns with the public's response to the SARS phenomenon, also to Reuters.
According to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary (abridged edition), epidemic, as an adjective, means ": affecting many persons at one time
As of April 29, there were 5,462 confirmed cases of SARS, out of a world population of 6.1 billion. Statistically, that is less than one in a million. One may say such a large view in this instance is myopic, since SARS is not evenly distributed around the globe. Then let's look at just China. On April 29, there were 3303 confirmed cases of SARS, out of a population of 1.3 Billion—that's 2 ½ out of a million! Of those statistical few, 148 have died. As tragic as even one premature death is, the numbers are again comforting—a mortality rate of .000000113, or a little more than one-tenth of one one-millionth!
Not close enough? Beijing: As I write, there are 1347 cases out of a population of 13,000,000. If you were in Beijing about two weeks ago, you had one chance out of a thousand of getting sick with SARS. And with the death count at 59, we can say that if you were in Beijing two weeks ago, and you got sick with SARS, you had 4 chances out of 100 of dying.
Every day, 3,000 children in Africa die of Malaria, a preventable and curable disease. Last year, 250,000 people died of flu. We know that after 20 years AIDS still kills almost everyone who gets it. There is still no cure or vaccine. There is also no media frenzy about these diseases—at least not anymore.
Earlier this month two Chinese runners were yanked from a marathon in the Netherlands because of the SARS panic. In cities throughout the west people are staying away from Chinatown districts in droves—even in New York, where not a single case of SARS has been reported.
David Baltimore, who is also president of the California Institute of Technology, lays much of this at the feet of the media. "What we are seeing is a playing up of the things that make people worry," he said.
But isn't this just another confirmation of the media only supplying what its customers crave. Baltimore thinks so. "In some sense people like to be frightened," he said. "And so, to some extent what I am saying is a denial of what seems to be a basic human instinct—to get a sort of frisson (shiver) of excitement out of danger. And the press is playing into that."
As perverse as it seems, there is something thrilling about gossip and news of quarantines, school closings, mass exoduses—a sense of history. But thrills are short-lived. We tire of them quickly, and that is the most serious danger from SARS. We know that most coronaviruses usually fade away with summer, only to come back with a vengeance with the return of winter.
Therefore, the experts tell us we have perhaps a six-month window in which we can all but eradicate the SARS virus. We can do this if we stay cautious and diligent, using the remedies that have finally been put in place. We must do this methodically, systematically, even when the "thrill" is gone. Without the panic.
Perhaps the most important thing about this new bug that we do know is if you don't have contact with someone who has it, you won't catch it.
But if you do, you have almost a 95% chance of living long enough to come home and get run over by a taxi! Of course, here in Xiamen, since there are only three known cases of SARS in all of Fujian Province and no deaths, you're far more likely to die in a traffic accident than from SARS.
"What happened to Hong Kong, for example, with the hotel occupancy rate at 2 percent, is an overreaction," David Ho said.
"As much as overreaction, there has been a lack of balance, of putting it into perspective, because it is a real problem, no question," David Baltimore said. "Boycotts of Chinese-owned businesses (in America) and scenes of people walking the streets of Hong Kong wearing surgical masks show that the general public does not understand the real dangers," Baltimore concluded.
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little said. Very shortly people stopped listening to anything else he said. Panic has a way of doing that.
Joseph Bosco is an author and journalist who is currently a Visiting Professor of Literature at Xiamen University, P.R. China.