For two months Hong Kong's 6.8 million residents
have been at the centre of the Sars (severe acute respiratory
syndrome) outbreak, better known across the border in mainland
China as "strictly avoiding realistic statistics". But the
crisis now seems driven more by fear and hysteria than actual
risk of infection.
Yet with the sensationalist newspapers posting doomsday
headlines and including Ebola and Aids in the same sentences as
Sars, it's not surprising that so many in Hong Kong are terrified.
The coverage makes it easy to forget that Sars, which knocked Iraq
off the front pages of the local press two weeks before Saddam was
deposed, has not yet claimed 99.98% of the city's population.
Hong Kong's nervous residents have split into four camps as they
attempt to come to terms with the virus. The first group consists
of the gung-ho expats who fail to wash their hands 16 times...
