Well, I must admit, this is fucking weird.

Here I sit, in the business class lounge (Sod you pond scum who don’t fly enough to get upgraded) in one of the busiest international airports in the world and there appears to be a total of about 40 people here with me. That’s 40 including the pond scum, this place is EMPTY.

Of course, I’m in Hong Kong airport.

I’ve been thorough this place countless times in the last year or so, such is the life that we lead trying to keep ourselves employed in the current climate;

“How’s business?”
“Busy, outside Hong Kong”

My most common conversation of the last year.

The silence is deafening, the muzac disturbingly noticeable, hidden as it usually is by the background noise of literally thousands of people going about their busy important little lives at the same time I’m going about my inestimably more important one.

So, off to Taipers again, in a furious attempt to justify my employment by busying myself building shop fonts for a handbag company.

Actually, it’s not fair to put them down; they’re a good client and, these days, a client alone is a rare thing, let alone a good one. I wonder how much longer we’ll be allowed to work for them since the regime change, but enough of that.

This place is DEAD. They still don’t have a sale on at Sound and Vision, known locally as the most expensive electronics outlet in HK, and duty free, no less. Of course the laugh is, there’s no duty on electronics in HK anyway, so one has to wonder what their angle is. In answer, you only have to watch their clientele; transfer passengers. No time to trip down town where they would notice that Fortress is 30% cheaper but still with the idea in their mind that HK is cheap for electronics. I really would have thought that the dirge of information that the internet has made available to all and sundry would put paid to that, but it seems not. Not yet, anyway.

Meanwhile, the world is in the grip of the epidemiological panic that is SARS, known here as Atypical Pneumonia, as the government don’t like the connection between SARS and HK SAR (Special Administrative Region.) They really fretted about that, whilst Rome burned, no doubt. I have read so much about this disease, that I really can’t believe how little I actually know about it. And the timing. Bloody hell, you’d have thought that pathogens (correct word?) would know better than to strike when the press attention is on the new imperialism. Bloody cheek.

I’ve no idea what to believe or how much to worry. Of course panic never helped anyone, the run on rice last week prompted by some snotty 14 year old’s hoax statement that HK was to be declared and infected port and so no one would import food anymore was simply an object lesson in that. That incident also served as a demonstration that, no matter how infectious the disease, the wavefront of rumour will always surge ahead of it.

Masks everywhere, every brand you want; 3M, surgical, LV, Gucci, Paul Frank (I kid you not) and the government, whilst all wearing masks on the telle, are not actually advocating wearing them officially (unless you are showing symptoms.) Of course the press, long bored with reporting facts, are printing panic and I suspect the government feel that this is serving their ends. Cynically speaking, Hong Kongers are exceptionally selfish individuals. I’m not saying that this accusation could not be levelled against the majority of the world’s developed nation populations, as surely such a distinction would be unnecessary should that not be the case, but the description stands. Tell Hong Kongers to inconvenience themselves in order to avoid spreading a disease to others and you would be greeted with a polite smile. Tell them (or even insinuate) that they will protect themselves by wearing a mask, well, around 60% of the population will be sporting them in the morning. For the government, there’s no difference and they themselves aren’t actually misleading anyone, the press are, so the end justifies the means nicely.

But are the mask advocates right? When I heard about Park n Shop and Wellcome (the 2 major supermarket chains in HK) preparing to shut down (a knock on rumour created by the hoax I mentioned earlier) I treated it with good humoured derision. “Oh well, off to stock up on marmalade and salad dressing, then; as that’s all that’ll be left” we joked. There was this very quiet voice in the back of my mind, though, and it kept saying “what if it’s true?” Then I started thinking “is the idea absurd because I think it is, or just because it is?” Of course, the idea was absurd, but then so, I feel, is the current international panic over a disease with a relatively low death rate (100 of 3000 infected, so far – similar to the Blue Nile virus and, some doctors argue, “typical” pneumonia.) It should be noted that, whilst all this is going on, there’s an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo that has killed 120 out of 135 people that it has infected so far. More deaths than SARS in a shorter space of time and a 10% chance of survival if infected. Well, they’re Africans and there’s too many of them anyway (and they’ve got no oil) so who cares I suppose. Far less important than the prospect of a few Europeans or (dread to think) North Americans getting an (admittedly very bad) cold. Ebola, now, if you want something to panic about panic about that, what a truly horrible disease. My wife and I were in Tanzania in 2000, when there was an outbreak in neighbouring Uganda. We were on safari with friends in the middle of a game reserve near Same, in the middle of the country. According to the visitor’s book, there were 2 Swiss guys in the park with us and no one else. Rarely have I been in a place so bereft of human life. Andrea and I both had nosebleeds at the same time (an early symptom of Ebola, which liquefies your organs so they flow out of your orifices.) Not that it made any difference, but we were a 5 hour drive from the edge of the park at the time. I nearly pissed myself in fear. Turned out the dry air had caused the nosebleeds.

I digress. Of course, the absurdity of panic doesn’t necessarily mean that the mask advocates are actually wrong. No one is willing to really put themselves on the line to advise on this one at the moment so the panic merchants and rumour mongers have it being as, in the absence of properly confirmed information, we will tend to plump for the conservative option, especially in this comfortable “developed” world that we inhabit. I note that the WHO is particularly quiet on the subject of masks as a prophylactic.

So we try to go about our lives as normally as possible. Andrea’s is unavoidably disrupted due to the government’s closure of all the schools; another master stroke, as the kids all head for the nearest shopping mall where they can infect each other unsupervised or are dragged off by their panic stricken parents to “un infected” countries. Un infected so far. I shouldn’t put these people down, if I had kids I might well think as they do. Where will it all end, though? Will this all just go away? Will people just stop getting infected and those that are either get better or die and the disease will become a thing of the past? I cannot think of a single logical reason why this would be so. I think that this disease will likely be a part of life until a treatment is developed, the only real question for me is; will it break out of the hospitals and into the community? Already there have been forays; a quarter of cases in HK originated in one housing estate, Amoy Gardens. There the disease spread like wildfire and still no-one can quite work out how.

I have read through the preceeding and have decided that I am rambling considerably. Of course I’m no longer sat in the airport. I have, in fact, been to Taipei, returned and am currently on the train back into the city. I will leave you with this.

Regarding SARS, these are the things that frighten me;

After a month of frantic searching and 3000 patients to examine, they still can’t say with certainty what causes SARS or test for it reliably.
A quarter of the cases in HK are medical staff. When will the hospitals stop being able to cope as significant portions of their staff become patients?
There is absolutely no screening for SARS for people exiting Hong Kong. This is unforgivable.
Finally, and most worryingly, given our proximity to Guandong; I believe the Chinese Government are lying. They say that they’re not hiding anything and that they’re in control. Coming from the Chinese government, that is tantamount to admission that they are and they’re not, respectively.

Ending on such a negative note as this is, I may not send it. Really, life is OK, we just need some reliable and authoritative data to act upon and we can either return to normal or readjust ourselves to a new normality.