The streets and the restaurants were empty, hundreds of people quarantined in their homes. Arrivals at the airport had fallen to a historical low, and those who could had left already. People married protected by face masks, while children’s birthday parties were cancelled. Health-workers were covered head-to-toe in plastic protective gear, and hospital visits were kept to the bare minimum.
Hong Kong in the time of SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that scarred the city in the first few months of 2003, was a scared, surreal place.
The virus, a coronavirus identified at the end of March by Carlo Umberti, an Italian doctor working for the World Health Organization that caught the disease in Vietnam and died of it in a hospital in Bangkok, originated in Guangdong, in China, but a secretive system kept it hidden until it had spread widely, killing hundreds. In Hong Kong alone, 299 people lost their lives.
