The name of this site is take from a picture I took in a Beijing Supermarket, posted at:
http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~kmiller/Pictures/Instant_poodle.jpg
Here are a few days' worth of reports from the land of SARS:
Thursday, April 17
Lots of things are going on on the SARS front here. The government continues its policy of reporting very precise but inaccurate information, and so rumors are running amok in a way that I've only experienced here during a visit during the martial law period in late 1989. The difference is that people have access to all sorts of information, but most, including me, don't have access to any really trustworthy source to confirm rumors.
One of my wife's teachers came into class and announced brightly "I hear all the Korean students are leaving!" (most of her classmates are Korean). I don't think there was any malice involved, just rumor spreading.
More authoritatively, the students tonight said that there were two people infected with SARS who'd lived in the dormitory next to them. They thought they were in the campus hospital, but didn't really know. Students are the ones wearing masks, in general, although when I went to a meeting tonight there were 3 boys about 8 years old talking excitedly together outside with voices muffled by the masks they were wearing. Still, it's not that common. I rode the subway yesterday to go renew my visa, and counted 3 masks in the car I was in, out of about 50 people.
I understand the WHO has criticized the government here for not reporting on SARS cases in military hospitals, including ones they visited, and the government insists that they are reporting on those cases. It reminds me of a story a colleague told from the first time he came here in the 1970s. He was given a phone number at the embassy to call about his visa, but then the person who answered said, "I'm sorry, we don't have that number at the Embassy." (Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?)
That causes quite a few problems. For example, when I hear on the radio that "no foreign students or faculty in Beijing have come down with SARS," my immediate cynical reaction is to wonder what's going on that prompted that claim. (The International Herald Tribune is reporting that an international economics program at Peking University that closed because someone has SARS, but it may be a coincidence). It's really a shame, because for all I know the government really *is* doing all it can to control SARS. They're spraying disinfectant everywhere, and based on the local news I was worried taking the subway yesterday that it would be overly sanitized for my protection; I couldn't detect any difference either way, although the subway has always been reasonably clean.
I read something about the big cluster of cases in a Hong Kong apartment block that said it was due to feces from the construction project next door, where one of the workers had SARS. That's worrisome because I'm frequently reminded of the limited sanitation facilities in the construction project across the street from us. Every week a bus takes a bunch of workers back home and brings in a new set of workers, so I worry that if they start getting sick, it could spread pretty quickly (not to mention the thought of someone operating the big cranes above us with a fever. Yikes!).
Students also live in very crowded conditions, 6 to a room in some cases, I think, so it's not surprising that they're worried about getting sick.
One of the students in the group I met with tonight was from Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, where there's a cluster of cases. She knows the family -- one of them visited Guangzhou and got sick, and then everyone at home except for the grandmother and a young child got sick on her return.
Schools where we want to videotape or collect data are often asking us to wait until after the May vacation (the first 7 days in May) because they're worried about SARS. I can't see how the situation is going to be better then, although I certainly hope it is.
It's been a great Spring, dread diseases aside, with frequent enough rain that it's relatively green here.
Hopefully I'll have something more research-related to report next time.
Saturday, April 19
Today I ran a “practice marathon” over to and around the Summer Palace. It was a beautiful day, with the temperature around 60 degrees after an overnight rain. That’s farther than I was supposed to run and my wife and coach, is not entirely pleased with that, but I did it for three reasons. First, the Great Wall Marathon is very daunting, and I wanted to be able to imagine how tired I’d be when I have to climb the wall again at around 20 miles. Second, I wonder if it will really be held, given SARS, and this way at least I’ll have run a marathon this Spring, of sorts. Finally, there is something that happens physiologically around 20 miles. Supposedly at around that point you’ve used up your stores of (whatever it is in the ATP cycle; I should have paid more attention in school) and begin burning fat. I notice that my breathing changes around that point and I need more water, which is consistent with what’s supposed to happen. It was hot enough that I went through 3 bottles of water and one bottle of Sprite (bad idea) in addition to the smaller flasks of sports drink I bring with me. When I came back to campus there was a barrier at the gate and guards with facemasks who wouldn’t let the cab in, so I had an unexpected walk about ¾ mile back home.
Rumors and dread stories about SARS abound. I was told that smokers aren’t getting SARS (about the opposite of what I’d expect). I read on the web that this rumor was started because “smoked meat doesn’t rot.” I gave up alcohol for Lent, but maybe I should start resorting to it tomorrow, because “pickled vegetables don’t rot.”
Some of the news reports from overseas are pretty disgusting, including reports of driving patients around in ambulances to hide them from the WHO inspection team. Beijing has an incredible number of hospitals, so it wouldn’t be so hard to do, except that people will get sick because of it. The fact that health workers are getting sick and dying, particularly if any of the nurses who had to hide patients in ambulances should die, is going to be a big problem, I think. It very much does seem to be in the nature of the government to hide things. For example, there’s a big scandal in Liaoning province, where some 3,000 students got sick after drinking soy milk they had to buy through their school. The article (making sure to specify that it was a Sino-US joint venture that made the soymilk) says that a) the milk cost students twice as much as it would on the open market, b) it was not cooked enough and so students had an allergic reaction, c) the local government insists that the student who died did so from unrelated causes, d) when parents starting taking their children to Beijing for treatment after the local hospital couldn’t figure what was wrong, the local authorities posted guards at the train station and asked teachers to visit parents of children who were not in school to see if they had left for the capitol or had talked to reporters, e) when reporters called the town to ask about it, they were that the town didn’t want this reported. This pattern is fairly common, with crusading reporters from Beijing reporting things that are covered up in other regions, where the local authorities have cowed the local press. The problem comes when something happens in Beijing, where there's no outside force to spill the beans.
I wonder what, if anything, will happen to the retired doctor here who held a press conference about hiding SARS patients in military hospitals. I understand that they person who told the world about the blood-transfusion AIDS problem was sent to prison. My guess is that this will not happen this time, but we shall see.
In the lack of clear channels of information, rumors abound.
Monday, April 21.
Another beautiful day. I went for about a 5 mile run and noticed that they were turning many people away from entering campus. I hoped they wouldd just let me in when I came back in the East gate, and so they did. My wife worries about our lack of university ID, although she has her tuition receipt and a dining center card, and I am hopeful I can bluff my way in if I need to.
I keep trying to think of a hopeful resolution to this. Here’s the only one I can think of. After the blood test becomes reliable, it may turn out that everyone has already been exposed to SARS and those susceptible to it have already come down with it. It’s possible, although it does seem unlikely.
Otherwise, we’re in for a long haul. I was hoping we could run adults in the eye-tracking study at least, but that’s a good setting for spreading a virus. I don’t think the IRB would be happy if someone got a fatal disease from being in one of our studies. I heard secondhand that the leaders of the university were told to expect it to take 3-5 months to get this under control. That seems about right, although it may be the kind of things that never really gets under control. It’s still a big question as to how many people have been exposed to it, because without knowing the denominator it’s impossible to know either how contagious or how virulent it is.
As for us, it looks like my wife's classes are still going on. I’m going to have to turn to writing and perhaps meeting with small groups of students. As long as her classes keep going on we might as well stay here, although I don’t think we’re going to let our daughter come to visit.
They didn’t seem to get any new vegetables at the small store where I usually get fresh vegetables for the evening, or else people were really stocking up. Alice had gone to the larger campus grocery store and said people seemed to be panic-buying noodles, so perhaps that’s the answer.
More and more people are wearing masks, and I wonder if there will be a tipping point at which it’s rude not to wear one. At a small grocery store where I stopped, a man and woman were in front of me. The cashier was wearing a mask, as was the woman. The man wasn’t, but he had folded up the collar of his coat and was talking into it like a thug in an old film noir. He misheard what the cashier said muffled through her mask and it was kind of humorous watching them sort it out.
As I biked by the campus hospital I noticed the ambulance was parked there, somewhat at an angle. It was gone when I returned. The worst part of something like this in an information-poor environment is that people get paranoid, in the specific sense of finding meaning in everything that happens, such as not being able to send an SMS message (“they must be blocking it”), or the way an ambulance is parked (“they must have rushed someone here with SARS”). Not helpful, but human nature.
Tuesday, April 22.
A gray, hazy, more typical Beijing day. They opened up some of the massively rebuilt park north of campus (where an old moat was, officially 花园路/“Hua yuan lu” or Flower garden road). It’s really, really nice. I took some pictures of the park in its torn up state back in January; they still have a ways to go, but if they can keep it up it will be a really wonderful place. Nice day for a run. I think there were more people outside. The SARS report I heard last night had an expert extolling long distance running, and even telling people what target heart rate they should try to achieve based on their age (although the numbers were very low, I thought). He also definitely felt people should run in the afternoon or evening instead of in the morning, but I couldn’t understand his reasons for that. A student once told me that you shouldn’t run in the morning because there wasn’t as much oxygen (because the trees hadn’t been producing oxygen during the night), so I was trying to figure out if this was his idea, too, but I don’t think so. It probably *is* better for your body to run at night, but it’s not realistic for most people given needs to make dinner, take care of children, etc. On the other hand, people in China bathe at night, so that might be another advantage.
The radio continues with its “happy talk” news, although they did report that 8 more people in Beijing died yesterday of SARS. They talked about how more and more people in Guangzhou are doing Tai Qi in the parks to build up their health. I imagine this is because they’re petrified of going to movie theaters and places like that and, lacking health care, are desperate to do anything they can to avoid getting this disease. I still remember the first I heard of this illness, back in late January when we first came, in the form of an article talking about the silly people in Guangzhou rushing to get some kinds of medicine because they were afraid of rumors of some kind of infectious pneumonia that authorities said had only affected a small number of people. It didn’t take too much reading between the lines to realize that *something* was going on. In the same way, everyone here assumed that there were more cases of SARS than the government admitted, although people were shocked that there were 20 times the number cases (including the suspected ones). Someone I talked to had an older teacher in one of their classes go on a big rant about how much they hated the government for doing that. I don’t know what I would do now if I were the government, or even a decision-maker at this school, but the lack of trust is going to make whatever they do harder to pull off.
I expected my wife to be back from her class by now, because yesterday they were going to have a meeting to decide whether to continue. I assumed they’d stop, because that’s the safe decision to be made, to avoid the responsibility of having someone get infected in your class and die. The English class she teaches at church has been cancelled. I took the call, and the woman who supervises it (an older, sort of fluttery Canadian woman) said that the city had announced that any school that continues classes will have to pay a fine. I don’t know that she’s a good informant, though. It will be amazing if they cancel all classes, although they’ve already postponed the exams for entrance into the university.
If Alice’s classes continue, we’ll probably stay here. I can write here almost as well as at home, and there may be other things I can do. If her classes stop, then I’ll really think about coming home. We may try to do some traveling first, but I’m not sure that will be feasible.
Interesting times! I know it is not really an old Chinese curse, but it does seem to fit the times and situation so well…
Sunday, April 20
Today was Easter. We went to a nice, long English-language Mass at the South Cathedral. I had a sense there were fewer people on the street, particularly at Xidan and Wangfujing, the big shopping areas. When I biked by Xidan there was a table of young women selling jars of some kind of beauty product – it looked like facial cream. They were all wearing facemasks, so I wasn’t surprised that they had no customers.
After church we biked over to Wangfujing to look for some guide books in case we get to travel around China in June as we planned. I was particularly interested in getting the Lonely Planet guidebooks for all of China and for Tibet. The foreign languages bookstore there had some of that series on the first floor, but neither of the ones I wanted. I asked if they had them, and the clerk said they don’t carry them. As I was paying for something, I was reading the store guide on the wall, and noted it said they have imported books on the third floor, too. So we went up there and hit a real jackpot of great books, albeit at fairly high prices. They had a display of most of the Lonely Planet books, except for the ones I wanted. When I asked them there, though, they said they did have them and pulled them out of a cabinet under the display. My wife was also able to find two more novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novelist she’s become very interested in.
Then we biked back. Alice has someone who comes to converse in Chinese and English with her, but she called to cancel. I biked north to a big supermarket to get the makings of as close to an American Easter dinner as I could make. I made mashed potatoes, steamed asparagus, and something like an Irish stew with lamb and carrots and onions. In order to test my theory about pickled vegetables and SARS (see below), I also bought a little bottle of erguotou (二锅头), popular distilled alcohol made from sorghum. It’s really cheap – about 30 cents US for a pint bottle. Looking it up in Wenlin, it’s also slang for a divorced or widowed man. If I don’t get SARS, we’ll know why.
I heard a truly amazing bilingual news conference on the China Radio International local English-language FM station, which I guess was broadcast nationwide. I tried to find it on, TV, but couldn’t find it on any of the stations we get. Someone from the State Council a) announced that there are many more SARS cases in Beijing than previously acknowledged (more than 300, with another 400 suspected cases), and b) responded to very rude questions from the international press. Every question in Chinese was translated in English and vice versa. It reminded me again how much I hate the BBC style of interviewing, which is to ask someone a long question beginning “But surely you must agree…” In this case, the BBC person suggested that the reason the health minister wasn’t giving the press conference was because he was the designated scapegoat, which turned out to be right (although Beijing’s major lost his job, too). It was a bit chilling when someone asked him if he would encourage people to visit China now, and he dodged the question (saying something like, “I can see that you are all in China now, and our concern is protecting the health of everyone here.”). There was also a good question from the CRI reporter about what would happen if this gets out into the countryside, something that has really worried me as I watch the bus each week taking workers from across the street to and from the countryside. They live in really squalid conditions here that seem ripe for spreading SARS, and I don’t know what would happen if it gets beyond the reach of the health care system. The official replied that that was their biggest worry, and that was why they were canceling the May 1 holiday. He suggested that there are many beautiful places around Beijing, such as the Fragrant Hills and the Summer Palace, where people can go on the one-day holiday they’ll have this year.
Later in the evening, I heard from two colleagues that courses are cancelled in the Psychology department. They both seem very worried that we will get sick, and they keep sending over all sorts of Chinese medicine. I went into the YingDong building to pick up a notebook I had left there and found almost all the grad students there. They’d been cleaning the lab with bleach and told me the latest rumors about SARS, including that a female student in their dorm had gotten SARS. Biking home I saw the campus ambulance (a big van) driving off campus with its lights flashing, not speeding, but ominous nonetheless.
10:21:01 PM #
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
