Ordinary Gweilo

The news that a Taiwanese military researcher managed to infect himself with SARS has caused alarm in Hong Kong, and I am sure that sales of masks will have been given a boost. The SCMP was calm and rational, devoting most of page one and all of page three to the story. They had a typically pointless picture (“passengers at Chek Lap Kok fill out health declarations yesterday”) and a panel about “Hong Kong’s contingency plan”. You will be very re-assured to hear that if we reach ‘Level 2’, the Chief Executive will take charge. That should do the trick.

On Wednesday, Hong Kong issued a SARS alert at the lowest-level (as you do, when a Taiwanese researcher who has not been anywhere near Hong Kong falls ill). So what headlines do we find in newspapers around the world? Well, there was “SARS case alert in Hong Kong” in the New Zealand Herald, which might give the casual reader the impression that there was a case in Hong Kong.

The rearcher in Taiwan has obviously been very stupid, not only by failing to take properly precautions, but then travelling to Singapore, and when he knew he was infected he delayed going to hospital because he “didn’t want to bring shame on Taiwan”. Unbelievable! During the SARS outbreak earlier this year, one thing that particularly annoyed me was the ban that Taiwan placed on Hong Kong people travelling there. Not because I had any wish to go there, but because this type of hysterical reaction made things so much worse.

We had a brief holiday in Australia during the SARS outbreak, and it was quite frightening to see how empty Chep Lap Kok was, and how few passengers were on the plane. Then when we got there, the customs official checking our bags for illicit food products got scared because my son sneezed twice, and we had to wait nearly an hour for someone to take his temperature. In the local newspaper there was a story about a woman who had gone to Paris on Cathay Pacific, and was expecting them to get her back to Australia without a stopover in Hong Kong! The problem was less SARS itself than the paranoia and over-reaction that followed. If SARS does come back, I hope that we see a bit more common sense being employed.