- BEIJING -- The economic costs
of SARS in China are growing by billions of dollars, threatening to shake
the government of the world's most populous nation if it can't contain
the epidemic quickly.
-
- Already an estimated $30 billion has been shaved off
the economies of countries affected by SARS because of stalled tourism,
less consumer spending and disruption in trade and investment, according
to the World Health Organization. China, the epicenter of the epidemic,
is likely to bear the brunt of its global impact.
-
- SARS already has cost several Communist Party officials
their jobs and has created a crisis of confidence for China's recently
installed new generation of leaders, who are under mounting domestic and
international pressure to contain the epidemic. Their initial cover-up
of the disease's spread has made many Chinese distrust official information
on the disease.
-
- That crisis of confidence could quickly evolve into a
crisis of governance if Chinese leaders allow SARS to damage the economy.
China needs high economic growth to provide new jobs for its growing population
and millions of underemployed farmers. The Communist Party, which has a
monopoly on power, stakes its legitimacy on the promises of economic growth
and development.
-
- "All of the legitimacy of the government is based
on economic growth," said Wu Guoguang, a former editorial writer for
the government-run People's Daily who's now a professor at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. "If the economy has troubles, everything
has troubles."
-
- Far beyond China, even in countries that may escape a
major impact from SARS, the epidemic will provoke a reassessment of the
risks of globalization, according to Jean-Pierre Cabestan of the French
Centre for Research on Contemporary China, in Hong Kong.
-
- The SARS virus, a new strain of the coronavirus group,
is believed to have leapt from animals to humans in China's far southern
Guangdong province, a hot, humid place where huge numbers of people and
animals live cheek-by-snout. Most of the world's influenza viruses are
believed to have originated there.
-
- While the proponents of global economic integration have
focused public attention on cheap tennis shoes and expanding markets, the
threats that can arise from mixing poverty, population density and disease
with porous borders and modern transportation have been ignored, according
to Cabestan.
-
- "This cocktail is something nobody looked at carefully,"
he said.
-
- China, now a key player in the world economy, still has
vast areas of entrenched poverty, poor hygiene and bad health care. What
the SARS epidemic reveals, Cabestan said, is that those problems are no
longer China's alone.
-
- "SARS is a sort of environmental disaster,"
he said. "It shows everybody that they have to be concerned with what
is going on in China."
-
- Experts at a SARS conference in Toronto on Wednesday
said better diagnostic tests for SARS were needed urgently, because the
chest X-rays now used weren't definitive. The experts called for blood
and fecal tests and throat swabs.
-
- Beijing's hospitals are some of the best in China, vastly
better than the simple clinics in the countryside, where even the most
basic care is too expensive for most rural Chinese. Yet Beijing's city
government warned Wednesday that its hospitals were becoming overwhelmed
by new SARS cases.
-
- "We were ill-prepared in terms of the ability of
doctors and nurses, as well as medical equipment and facilities,"
acting Mayor Wang Qishan said. He added that it was too early to predict
when the epidemic would peak in Beijing.
-
- Wang's predecessor was sacked 10 days ago for mishandling
the epidemic.
-
- China's government has imposed drastic measures to combat
SARS in the nation's capital, which has been paralyzed by a soaring number
of cases.
-
- Since April 20, when Beijing officially had only 37 SARS
cases, the number had risen to 1,440 as of Wednesday. An additional 1,408
suspected cases in Beijing were certain to push the number of confirmed
cases much higher in coming days.
-
- The confirmed cases in Beijing represented nearly half
of all reported cases in China, where SARS has been detected in two-thirds
of the nation's provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.
-
- With 159 SARS-related deaths so far, China accounts for
nearly half the 353 deaths from the epidemic worldwide. In Beijing, which
reported nine more deaths Wednesday, the virus has killed at least 75 people.
-
- Nearly 10,000 others have been quarantined in the capital,
where schools, nightclubs, cinemas and many offices have been closed. Many
streets are deserted, in part because more than 1 million of the city's
13 million residents are believed to have fled. Millions more are staying
at home to avoid exposure to the virus.
-
- In a dramatic show of its resolve, the government this
week announced the completion of a 1,000-bed hospital for SARS patients
in a suburban district north of Beijing. It was built in eight days by
7,000 workers.
-
- As grim as the SARS crisis is in the capital, other parts
of China could fare worse if the sprinkling of cases across the country
explodes into a nationwide outbreak. Most provinces are much poorer than
Beijing and much less prepared to deal with the epidemic.
-
- Vulnerability has sparked panic in some communities.
Last Sunday in the rural town of Chagugang, about a two-hour drive from
Beijing, thousands of people rioted after word spread that a local school
would be turned into a ward for SARS patients from the nearby city of Tianjin.
-
- On the outskirts of Beijing, farmers have set up roadblocks
to try to keep out people who might be infected.
-
- Wang, whose municipality includes a large area beyond
the city proper, said stopping the spread of the virus to rural areas was
a top priority for the government. He said each village had been ordered
to form a unit to fight SARS and that every household had been supplied
with thermometers to check for fever, a symptom of the pneumonia-like disease.
-
- If such measures fail and the epidemic continues to spread,
the impact on China's economy could be catastrophic, said Mao Yushi, a
Beijing economist who operates an independent research center.
-
- "The damage is not necessarily in proportion with
the number of cases," he said. "In economic terms, the real loss
comes not from the disease itself but from the suspicion among people ?
no one knows who is bearing the virus. It prevents people from having contact
with each other."
-
- Airlines, hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related
businesses have suffered the most so far, but the economic pain will spread
and deepen fast if the epidemic isn't checked, Mao warned.
-
- Michael Furst, the executive director of the American
Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, said there wasn't much evidence yet of
serious impact on U.S. companies beyond "a lot of hand washing and
hand wringing."
-
- But he said the impact would be severe if the epidemic
wasn't quickly contained.
-
- "If somebody's going to invest money here, at some
point they have to come," he said. "And nobody's coming."
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- http://www.statesman.com/nationworld/content/news/043003/0430sars.html
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