Sars In China

April to July of 2003

Public Relation Program

Situation Review

In March 2003, China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region reported the worst case of environmental/social health disaster in the wake of the region's recent history. SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome caused a total of six deaths with 173 people reportedly infected with the virus during that month. The Chinese has a saying, "Misfortune never travels alone"; soon neighbors Vietnam reported 62 cases including two deaths, and Singapore reporting 34 cases of illness with similar symptoms.

Later reports released gave reason of how the virus was spread to Beijing, China's capital city, by stating that on the 23rd of March 2003, Hong Kong (also known as SAR in short; the irony if you will) had to move some patients to Beijing's YouAn hospital for treatment of this virus. Unfortunately, during the treatment doctors and nurses attending to this batch of patients from the SAR were also reported to be suffering from the same symptoms as those of the patients resulting in the death of one nurse.

However, to make matters worst, it was later reported that in Guangdong Province, which neighbors Hong Kong some 300 people were warded in hospitals since November of 2002 with symptoms similar to SARS. During the same period, 5 people were also reported to have died from an unidentified disease in the Guangdong Province; suspiciously giving hint that the deaths were related to SARS. Needless to say, the public (both within China and her neighbors) was outraged by this piece of "missing" information.

According to China's Health Minister Zhang Wenkang, by the end of March 2003, a total of 1,190 SARS cases had been reported in China, with 1,153 cases alone in Guangdong Province. The other regions that reported SARS cases included: Beijing with 12 cases, Guangxi with 11 cases, Hunan with 7 cases, Shanxi with 4 cases, and Sichuan with 3 cases. Evidently, SARS had spread to all over China within that one month.

Products having or believed to contain disinfections and antipyretic functions were heavily sort after, especially vinegar and "Ban Lan Gen" (a Chinese medicine) causing unreasonable price increases for these products (refer to Table 1 below). The reason behind this mad rush was that the SARS virus was mentioned in the Chinese mass media to have the same set of symptoms as that of "feiyan" or influenza. One thing led to another, the Chinese public started to vie with each other to buy lots of health-supporting products for themselves.

Table 1

Product Price (in Chinese yuan)

Vinegar Before SARS 1

After SARS 16 to 50

Ban Lan Gen Before SARS 20

After SARS 120

By April of 2003, the SARS problem started to show its affect on China's tourism industry. Many countries begin to ban Chinese nationals from traveling in or entering into their respective countries; furthermore, many countries also forbade their citizens to travel into China because of the increasing number of SARS cases reported daily in the mass media. The Chinese Airline industry and ultimately the Chinese economy suffered a great blow. By the time the World Health Organization or WHO, removed China from the SARS hit list on June 24th of 2003, there were all together 5328 SARS patients in the Mainland with 348 deaths from SARS and another 4916 people considered recovered (refer to table below).

全国内地非典型肺炎疫情统计表（截至6月25日10时）

序

号 省

别 临 床 诊 断 病 例 疑 似 病 例

新 增 累

计 现住院治疗人数 治愈出院

人 数 死亡人数 新 增 排

除 合

计

数目/（其中由疑似转为临床诊断） 最后报告日期 数

目 最后报告日期

新

增 累

计 新

增 累

计

1 北京 0 6.06 2521 169 60 2245 3 192 0 6.17 1 4

2 四川① 0 6.06 20 1 0 17 0 2 0 6.11 0 1

3 辽宁① 0 6.03 7 3 0 2 0 2 0 5.22 0 1

合计② 0 - 2548 173 34 2173 3 195 0 - 1 6

累计③ 0 - 5328 210 37 4916 3 348 0 - 3 47

Planning

The Chinese government wants to maintain good relationships with WHO and other countries; therefore, it needs to reduce the negative image generated from the SARS problem. It also needed to answer public concerns (both within and outside of China) on future health and environmental cares. In short, China needs to reassure everyone that it is still an environmentally- and health- safe country for now and in the future.

Subsequently, the objective to achieve the above mentioned were differentiated into three sections. The first section dealt with convincing the WHO to maintain a positive image of the country again because the Chinese government had covered up the emergence