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 a day and refuse to wear the masks that have become this season’s must-wear accessory for many locals.
The second group comprises the highly alarmed who read the scare headlines and stay behind locked doors surrounded by bulk buys of rice, disinfectant, vitamin tablets, masks and anything else believed to prevent infection. Without quick action by the World Health Organization, they could have caused a run on cigarettes. Rumour had it that smoking a pack a day would keep the bug at bay.
The third group comprises people caught between the gung-ho and the alarmists. They swing between camps, depending on whom they lunch or dine with that day. Many were sent into a frenzy when The Rolling Stones cancelled the Hong Kong leg of their world tour. And when teams began pulling out of the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens many felt their time was up. They calmed down quickly though when they realized it was the French, Italians and Argentines who had chickened out.
The final group is the Sars statisticians who sit at dinner tables spouting the new figures for the day. They disclose that malaria kills 3,000 people a day and that Sars deaths globally are fewer than those killed in a wipe-out air crash. They are the new party bores.
The anxiety is still here but perspective seems to be returning. And people are slowly, albeit nervously, taking off their masks. The hope is that soon the days when someone can cause panic merely by enthusiastically clearing their throat could be coming to an end. But while the city’s residents may already be trying to return to normality, the damage to the reputation of the Special Administrative Region (SAR) has been done. And the scars will take a long time to heal.
Hong Kong will have to work hard to shed its image of being a Petri dish of disease best avoided. With businessmen and tourists heeding the WHO’s advice to keep away, visitor numbers in April slumped by 70%. It’s a painful blow. Tourism receipts account for 6% of the earnings of an already struggling economy entering its fifth year of deflation.
Cathay Pacific, the SAR’s air carrier, has cut flights by 40% and its share price has dived 20% over the past two months. In April alone it slumped 14.7%, pushing it well below book value. All other airlines with flights to the territory have slashed their schedules as demand continues to slump. Lufthansa, for example, now makes just three flights a week to Hong Kong, compared with 15 in February. And the departure board at Chek Lap Kok Airport is littered with cancelled flights, leaving those seeking to escape marooned for hours.
Hotel occupancy rates, down as low as 3% in some cases, have not, the statisticians tell us, been this bad since World War II. Other parts of the leisure and tourist industry have been dealt similar hits. The once vibrant restaurants and bars are grinding to a close. And there are no longer queues outside cinemas on a Sunday afternoon.
With unemployment at record levels and looking as if it will break through the 8% barrier as entertainment venues shut down, the government announced a HK$11.8 billion (US$1.5 billion) emergency spending plan to prop up badly affected areas of the economy. It will be too little too late for many.
Like the newspapers and magazines, financial analysts and economists have been quick to outdo each other in releasing gloom-packed reports. Rating agency Fitch said the city’s growth rate will fall to around 1.5%, or half its original forecast. Citibank cut its forecast from 2.8% to around 1%. And the figures could get worse unless the mainland gets a grip on the spread of the bug.
And China knows it must. It’s quickly ceasing to be the darling of international investors. Predictions of growth rates of over 8% are being slashed in the light of the troubling new cases of infections officially being reported. JPMorgan has revised its 2003 growth forecast to 7.4%. Others predict a figure as low as 5.8%.
To the average Hong Kong resident such forecasts are beside the point. They just want to know when Sars will disappear.
That’s something few are willing or able to predict.
