by Richard Schaefer
UNM Communication and Journalism Associate Professor
BEIJING, China - Beijing is waiting for the other shoe to drop.
One student on our campus was diagnosed with SARS this afternoon. Everyone knows he won't be the last. So, at times, the fear is palpable.
But, it was worse for me two nights ago when I was sitting on the toilet, nauseous and dizzy with what I hoped to God was food poisoning, or two-and-a-half weeks ago when we were sending the military hospital stories out of the country.
Yet for the students, it's worse now.
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I asked one of the other professors why I was beginning to become calm about all this, while they were finally scared. She said, "Because you've already gone through it. Don't you remember, Richard? You were scared three weeks ago! They're just seeing it now. It's still unfolding for them."
The International College at Beijing has about 200 Chinese students who have, for whatever reason, decided to get a Western-style education. So they have enrolled in a program sponsored by China Agricultural University and the University of Colorado at Denver. The program provides instruction in English to students who want to major in either communication or economics, and also become proficient in English at the same time.
These middle class Chinese students have decided to enter a system few of them or their parents have ever seen. And never having been to Asia, I thought it would be" fun and exciting" to teach here for about 10 weeks while I was on my sabbatical from the University of New Mexico.
We just had an emergency faculty meeting an hour ago, where the two college deans filled us in. The campus is moving toward a lockdown situation. No one will be allowed to leave or enter who does not have a powerful reason for doing so. Visitors can no longer enter the Foreign Experts Guest House where I live.
Most of the expatriate faculty remained calm during the meeting, but at its conclusion they immediately began making arrangements for their families to leave the country - to Russia or Armenia, or anyplace that planes will fly and where people can get visas.
The students too are leaving campus, despite the official directives to stay put. Many of the students are mistakenly thinking that things will be better outside Beijing. They are wrong. The countryside may not be worse now, but it will be worse soon. Others just want to be with their families when the epidemic sweeps through.
The Canadian Embassy is shut down. The American Embassy has been running on a skeleton staff for weeks and those who stay are receiving hazard pay.
Rumor has it that the World Health Organization (WHO) is upset that China has not completely stopped the 10-day May holiday and instead has only cut it to five days. So to punish China, the outside world is demanding that China not allow international travel during that period.
I would cut China off too if I were running the WHO. Having 300 million people crowded into intercity trains and buses is hardly the way to contain a disease that is primarily spread by droplet transmission.
So the current rumor is that Beijing airport and international trains will be shut down as of May 1. If that is true, and I tend to believe that rumor at this point, my April 30 flight to Los Angeles would be one of the last ones out of the country. Nevertheless, I'm trying to step that flight up three or four days, just to create a little cushion should the ban on international travel be pushed up, as well as to reduce my exposure here as well.
Right now everything is confusing. Students play soccer or basketball as if nothing was happening, while others are dragging their suitcases to the main gate to meet private drivers who been dispatched by their parents to haul them to the airport or hundreds of miles back home. Other students scurry about trying to finish up their final assignments while I look for e-mail from my wife and check the newspaper and WHO Web sites four times a day.
The CCTV television news leads off with a roundup of the SARS numbers from all the cities and provinces. They just said there were 588 confirmed SARS patients in Beijing. The next story showed now-standard shots of President Hu Jintao shaking hands with valiant health care workers, followed by video of workers spraying buses and airplanes and WHO doctors nodding approvingly as they take tours of SARS hospitals. After less than eight minutes, the SARS coverage ends and the Iraq occupation stories begin.
I suspect that there are about 1,000 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing and several hundred more waiting to be confirmed - no scandal this time, it's just that the official statistics are typically a couple days old when they are finally reported. That means a person in Beijing has about a one-in-7,500 chance of having SARS.
Not bad, but we all know it will get much worse before it gets better.
