We still seem to be able to leave campus freely, although people who don't live here can't come in and students are restricted in their movements. They all wear lanyards around their neck and are restricted in which dining hall they can eat and where they can shower. I suppose limiting their intermingling makes some sense in limiting the spread of SARS.

As this picture shows, there are increasingly large areas of campus demarcated by police tape. I don't really know what it means, because people freely move across it. Perhaps it's a warning sign that someone in that area has a confirmed or suspected case of SARS.

I mentioned Elie Wiesel's book Night previously, and watching this it's hard not to have a sense of a ghetto creeping closer to one all the time. Luckily, we're some of those people permitted to come and go, which makes an enormous difference. Various hotlines and TV call-in hows have been set up to allow people to discuss their fear of SARS, staffed by psychologists. My understanding is that the experience in the U.S. suggests that people who participate in such events end up feeling worse off than those who didn't have such counseling available to them. Perhaps the counseling and its consequences may take a different form here.

With the help of some friends in high places, I've been contacting the U.S. professional groups I belong to to see if they'd be willing to make available free access to their online article databases to students in Beijing during the current period. I'm happy to say that the Psychonomics society was the first to respond positively. I'm hopeful that the Society for Research in Child Development will participate, and I'm still waiting to hear from the American Psychological Association, which has the largest database. After we figure out the details of how to set this up, I'll contact some other groups. It's only a small gesture, but I think it is something that U.S. professional groups can do to help students in Beijing who have no classes to attend and can't go to physical libraries, all of which have been closed.

I suspect this emergency will be over by the time such access can make much different (at least I really, really hope it will be over). But given the little I know about viruses, I also suspect that this story will repeat itself in other cities and other times. So figuring out how to implement online access for those suddenly cut off from regular school is probably something worth knowing.

This is #2 in a series of 8 pieces of advice on how to avoid SARS, from a poster plastered all  over Beijing.

Here's the detail:

Translation:

Early Reporting

Once a new SARS patient or a suspected parient is discovered, the community unit, or the residents should in a timely way report to the district health protection office and the neighborhood committee, the district health protection office should verify the report and then report to the area sickness control center and the neighborhood committee.

The cartoon figure says:

We will certainly report the latest situation at the earliest time! (This isn't quite colloquial in English, but I think the meaning is clear)