The viral spell broke, and Hong Kong seemed to wake from a fever dream.
By Karl Taro Greenfeld April 16, 2020
In Hong Kong, the end of the SARS epidemic, in 2003, was accompanied by a curious combination of hope and fatigue.
In the spring of 2003, my family and I were living in Hong Kong, in a colonial-era flat near Victoria Peak, the mountain that dominates the city’s skyline. The previous year, just to the north, a coronavirus had emerged that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The virus, called SARS-CoV, had jumped the species barrier in a market, travelling from bats to civets to people. Its mortality rate was around ten per cent.
Initially, the Chinese government covered up the epidemic, threatening and silencing the physicians who issued warnings. Then, as the infection spread, it imposed a drastic crackdown on all social interaction. The national May Day holiday, when hundreds of millions of people travel around the country on vacation, was cancelled, and the Rolling Stones called off their concerts. Hong Kongers enacted social isolation even before it was ordered, and many expats departed, including my wife and daughters. By March, the city felt deserted. Night clubs were closed, restaurants abandoned, shopping malls desolate. The drive down Kennedy Road to Gloucester Road and then east along Hong Kong Island to my offices in Quarry Bay, usually a half-hour struggle through some of the densest traffic in the world, was now a fleet five minutes.
For those who remember SARS firsthand, the unfolding of the current COVID-19 pandemic has been eerily familiar. The new coronavirus appears to have spilled over in Hubei Province, a few hundred miles north of Guangdong Province, where SARS emerged; China’s decisions—the initial coverup, the cancellation of Lunar New Year celebrations, the rapid, gigantic mobilization—have echoed the past, too. (Its measures appear to be working; as of this writing, the spread of infection in mainland China has slowed dramatically.) Los Angeles, the city where I live now, looks the way Hong Kong did then. On Saturday night, I walked down to Sunset Boulevard, the city’s iconic thoroughfare, and stood in the middle of the street. The signals went from green to red to green again; no cars came. Happy cities may be happy in their own ways, but cities in the grip of disease share a common emptiness.
Hong Kong had been in crisis even before SARS. In 1997, Great Britain had handed the city over to China, in an agreement known as One Country, Two Systems. After reunification, Shanghai threatened to become China’s new financial capital, and people in Hong Kong worried that they would soon be living in “just another Chinese city”; its real-estate markets began a precipitous decline, and restrictions on civil liberties threatened its nominal sovereignty. SARS felt like a knockout blow to a city already reeling.
I was in Hong Kong because I edited Time Asia, an international edition of the newsweekly with a staff of sixty-two and bureaus around the region. When SARS broke out, we couldn’t work from home—the Internet wasn’t good enough. Instead, we watched from our offices as the green-and-white-roofed Star Ferry boats travelled, empty, across Victoria Harbor. Each afternoon, we waited for the Hong Kong Department of Health to release its numbers. We kept a betting pool, guessing how many new cases there would be. The idea was to get close but not go over; an optimist, I always lowballed.
We were trying to make light of a reality that had become terrifying. Hong Kong’s hospital system had crashed. Hundreds of front-line health workers had been infected, most of them through so-called super-spreader events. In the first, a mainland doctor, Liu Jianlun, had treated a patient in Guangdong who would later become known as the Poison King, because of how many cases could be traced back to him. After meeting the Poison King, Liu, who was in Hong Kong for a wedding, checked into the Metropole Hotel, went shopping on Nathan Road, and then returned to the hotel, where he vomited; the next day, he admitted himself to Kwong Wah Hospital, warned the attending physicians that what he had was highly contagious, and lost consciousness, ultimately infecting a half-dozen doctors and nurses. A larger cluster of cases at Prince of Wales Hospital, originating from an airport worker who had visited the Metropole, resulted in more than a hundred hospital workers falling ill. Some of the standard treatments for patients in respiratory distress—including the use of nebulizers, humidifier-like devices that turn liquid medicine into a breathable mist—ended up spreading the virus through the wards.
These stories and others deepened our dread; the government’s obfuscation compounded it. We learned that officials had been hiding cases, moving patients out the back doors of hospitals while World Health Organization inspectors came in the front. We suspected that what we didn’t know was worse than what we did. We imagined vast wards of the infected, gasping for breath.
The Hang Seng Index, which tracks stocks listed on Hong Kong’s exchange, shed fifteen per cent of its value between January and April. After a prankster falsely suggested that the city was going to be sealed off, some A.T.M.s briefly ran out of cash. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, on the first of April, Leslie Cheung, the openly bisexual Cantopop crooner and actor who had starred in “Happy Together” and “Farewell My Concubine,” leapt from the twenty-fourth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Cheung had always felt like a lucky charm for Hong Kong—a beloved and approachable celebrity we could see drinking in Lan Kwai Fong on any given night. Cheung’s death—he had suffered from depression—darkened our already dour moods.
Barely visible from my office windows was Amoy Gardens, an orange-and-beige housing complex. Nineteen buildings, each about thirty stories tall, housed about nineteen thousand people. The complex had become a notorious epicenter of the virus—the place, it was said, where SARS had gone airborne. On March 14th, an infected man visited his brother’s apartment; a week later, the complex had three or four cases; the next day, six or seven more. Soon, more than sixty new cases a day were emerging at Amoy Gardens, until there were nearly three hundred and thirty, many of them in block E, where the brother’s unit was located. What was terrifying about the Amoy Gardens cluster was its banality. It looked exactly like every other housing estate in Hong Kong. As television anchors solemnly intoned over footage of the apartments, with their 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and ParknShop downstairs, one couldn’t help but think that what was happening there could happen anywhere. (Later, it would turn out that the design of the drainage systems in the apartments had facilitated the spread of SARS.)
Meanwhile, in our offices, we wore protective gear. Talked about hand washing. Kept our distance. Outside of work, we lived solitary lives. Every social event was postponed into the indefinite future. I ate dinner alone in my flat, its diamond-necklace view of the city eerily dark. My lunch each day consisted of Chicken McNuggets. I had thought it through and concluded that, from slaughter to preparation, the McNugget process was such that no nugget risked contact with potentially virus-bearing human flesh. The industrial workers wore rubber gloves and masks; the nuggets were deep-fried in boiling oil hot enough, I hoped, to render any virus inactive.
