#6 in a series of panels from the Beijing SARs poster

6  - Diligently ventilate

Maintain office and residential air circulation. Fequently open windows to let air circulate inside for 30 minutes at a time, 2-3 times a day. Diligently clean and maintain a sanitary environment, diligently sun-dry clothes, bedding, etc. Ensure that air conditioning equipment is in good condition so as to ventilate properly, and wash the filter.

And the machine translation from http://www.netat.net/ :

Ventilate hardworkingly Keep the air of the office and dwelling unblocked. Through take and open the window, make the air circulate. Whether in room it ventilate for on the 30 minutes,2-3 times a day.the hardworking to sweep environmental sanitation is the hardworking to last clothes and bed clothes,etc.. Keep good performance of air conditioning , in order to ventilate, take and wash and separate the sharp network. 

I'm starting to learn more about how the campus here is trying to limit the chances that SARS will spread among the student population of more than 10,000 students (although I have no idea how many have left and gone home). Unlike me, students can't leave campus. They have a color-coded ID with their picture on it that identifies the dining halls they can use (instead of eating freely in any of the dining halls) and the showers they're supposed to use. The campus has shut down the most "disorderly" of the vegetable markets on campus and replaced it with a temporary one run by students. They are also erecting fences around some of the staff housing areas, such as the one surrounded by police tape in my 5/2/2003 posting. This presumably would permit them to isolate areas of the campus (although there are no gates, as of yet).

It's depressing to see all the changes of the last few years in favor of free movement being reversed because of a virus. This campus has torn down the masonry wall separating it from the world (replacing it with an easily scalable fence), and dropped the practice where you needed to get off your bicycle and stop by a security guard when coming in or going on. Now that's all changed, and every school or housing project I pass has a sign saying that only people who belong to that organization are allowed in. I wonder how long it will take for things to open up again when this storm passes? 

On the one hand, this seems pretty draconian, and students I've talked to seem depressed but supportive of the need for it. I haven't heard even rumors of more cases beyond the original two on campus (one student and one cleaning person). I watched a TV show the other night about students at Peking University, focusing on a young female student who was celebrating her birthday in quarantine. Her classmates gave her a nice party, but the TV crew had a camera with her and one with her mother back home showing them both sobbing as they talked about missing each other.

I also saw a show about the new instant hospital out in the suburbs (Xiao Tang Shan -- "little soup mountain," I guess), focusing on the army doctors coming in to work there. The hospital looked like a motel you might see in the U.S. Southwest, with small one-story units set in rows with a fair amount of space between them. The interviewer was asking the medical workers what their families thought about them being there, and they were expressing their dedication to working in the new place, but it was clear that they seemed fairly afraid. They showed one of the women getting her hair cut, which seemed strange to me until I realized that having long hair, as she did, would be a definite liability in dealing with all the precautions you need to take against a disease like SARS.

I really wonder how prepared a university like the one I teach at in the United States would be to deal with a situation like this. It seems that ever year several U.S. colleges experience an outbreak of meningitis, a more serious but possibly less contagious disease (although now there's a vaccine).  Trying to compartmentalize the campus here, in the way they're doing, is probably a critical step in dealing with a contagious disease, but one that would be difficult to implement.

U.S. college students have better living conditions, with more space, better sanitation, fewer students breathing the same air, etc. So, hopefully, this is not an issue that we'll have to face any time soon. But everything I've read about SARS includes biologists marvelling at the fact that it spreads as slowly as it has, and I suspect that a disease as deadly as SARS that spread like the flu would be as huge a problem for an American university as the current SARS is here.

So this should serve as a warning.