SARS has peaked everywhere except China - WHO
Outbreaks of SARS have now peaked in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam - but not in China, where the virus that causes it emerged and which will be key to halting its global spread.
China, the world's most populous nation, was the key to curbing the disease, said Dr David Heymann, chief of infectious diseases at the World Health Organisation (WHO). Currently in Bangkok, Thailand, he will brief Asian leaders attending an urgent summit on the disease on Tuesday.
At least 318 people around the world have died from SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), an atypical pneumonia caused by a new virus thought to have arisen in China's Guangdong province in November last year. The disease has been spread by air travellers to 28 countries, and more than 5,000 people have been infected.
Spread of the virus had peaked in all but one of the countries known to have outbreaks. "It seems that it has peaked in all places that we knew about on the 15th of March, except in China, and in China it's on the increase, unfortunately," he told reporters. "Taiwan wasn't known to have ongoing transmission then. It was Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam. They were the four."
But the disease has apparently claimed its first victim in another Asian country. A man classified as a probable SARS case has died in Indonesia, a health official there said, the first such death reported in the world's fourth most populous nation. Vietnam said its SARS outbreak had been successfully contained and the WHO in Hanoi said this success offered hope.
Asked if he was confident that the worldwide spread of SARS could be stopped altogether, Heymann said: "No we are not. We are hoping. China is the key and it's the unknown question in the whole formula, because if China cannot contain it, then it can't be removed."
SARS kills about six percent of the people it infects and has no known cure, and it could take years to find a vaccine.
Virus still a mystery to scientists
Heymann said there were still much that scientists and clinicians needed to understand about the new coronavirus that causes the disease before its spread could be brought under control. "We don't understand whether it is occurring in an asymptomatic form, which may be already spread around the world as occurred in AIDS, with a long incubation period."
The outbreak is having a severe economic impact in Asia, a region that faced recession, debt defaults and currency crises during a 1997-99 economic slump. Hotels, airlines and retailers already face slumping sales; hospitals are stretched to the breaking point and experts say the economic costs are bound to rise.
Taiwan, announcing the most draconian moves to date to control the virus, on Sunday banned visitors from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, while Beijing closed theatres and other entertainment centres where crowds might gather.
The Asian Development Bank cut its growth forecast for the region this year to 5.3%, from the 5.6% it expected in December, due to the impact of SARS and an uncertain global economic recovery.
But assuming the deadly virus can be brought under control swiftly with minimal damage to tourism, Asian economies - excluding Japan - should grow at a faster rate of 5.9% in 2004, the Manila-based bank said in a regional outlook.
"Prospects for 2003 are clouded by economic weaknesses in the industrial countries and uncertainties relating to the conflict in Iraq and the recent outbreak of SARS," the bank said in a statement. "If the epidemic is not brought under control by about mid-May, the economic impact on developing Asia will be much broader and deeper."
Canada, the only country outside Asia where SARS has claimed lives, said the disease will hit an economy that has long been the star performer within the Group of Seven rich industrialised countries.
Chinese public still in the dark
The WHO meanwhile urged Beijing's top two officials to tell the public more about how to fight SARS as the number of cases in the city topped 1,100 and people scrambled to protect themselves. Newspapers said 7,672 of the capital's 14 million people were under strict quarantine in several residential buildings, a construction area and dozens of hospitals after the city enacted sweeping powers to control spread of the virus.
Beijing, with 1,114 of China's 2,914 confirmed cases and 1,191 of its 1,921 suspected cases, "has by far the greatest burden of SARS cases for the health care system to cope with", said the WHO in a statement released earlier today. Fifty-six of China's 131 SARS deaths were in Beijing.
Countless Beijing businesses hung 'closed' signs and sent workers home as fear about the disease spread. Traffic was light and people who could opted to stay in. Most who ventured out wore masks - even while riding bicycles Beijing's on broad, wind-swept avenues.
WHO officials told acting mayor Wang Qishan and Liu Qi, the head of Beijing's Chinese Communist Party committee and a member of the powerful 24-member Politburo, the public knew too little about SARS, and it was engendering panic.
"If a hospital is closed, they should know why. Right now, they don't know where SARS is, so everyone is scared," said Henk Bekedam, the WHO's representative in China.