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Posted on 04/20/2003 9:49:19 AM PDT by Dog Gone

"Why aren't you guys wearing face masks?" I asked the man in a sober dark blue uniform manning the quarantine counter at Shanghai's international airport a few days ago.

"Our superiors won't allow us to," he said.

The official line is that Shanghai can relax as things are under control

"We want to wear them but the management say it would give the city a bad image," he told me.

It's a contrast with Hong Kong, where all the hotel reception staff, all the airport immigration personnel and the cabin staff on the Dragonair flight I've just come in on, are wearing masks.

Now, we've heard that China's civil aviation authority has ordered masks to be dished out to any passengers who request them.

And we see pictures of masked-up medical workers at the airport in Shanghai checking incoming passengers.

After my return, I keep on wearing my mask for several days and get busy with the household bleach, disinfecting my office door handles, so that if I've got it, hopefully, I won't spread it around.

'Panicky foreigner'

But what do I get for being such a good citizen?

In the convenience store, the shop assistants laugh at me. In the supermarket, the staff make remarks, thinking I won't understand.

"Look at that panicky foreigner," is the gist of what they're saying.

Q&A: What is Sars?

Then when I answer back, telling them I've just been in Hong Kong, they visibly take a step back.

At a news conference given by the city health authorities, I'm the only person to arrive wearing a face mask.

Oh no, actually one other colleague was wearing one. But he'd taken it off and only dared to put it back on again when he saw me with mine.

A woman from the local TV station asks a pointed question of the officials on the podium, alluding to us two mask-wearers.

Should we be wearing them in Shanghai, she wants to know.

That's the cue for me to ask my questions. I recount what the airport staff told me and ask, what is more important, image or people's health and safety?

And I ask what precautions they recommend for people arriving in the city from Hong Kong.

In answer I receive a complacent shower of bland and supposedly reassuring officialese.

"We Shanghai people should say a warm thank you to you for wanting to protect our health," one of the officials says.

The news conference provides some reassurance by setting out the structures and the mechanisms that have been set up to monitor the latest information on Sars.

It is hard to know the full extent of the disease in mainland China

The message is that the authorities have got things firmly under control and the population of Shanghai can relax.

It's just: can we believe the figures we are being given?

The panel of officials tell us that this, China's main financial hub, with its close links to Hong Kong and Taiwan and who knows where else, has only one confirmed case of Sars - a woman who is reported to have caught the disease on a trip to southern China.

We knew about the woman, actually. A few days ago, they told us she was a suspected case. Since then, her 68-year-old father has now also been confirmed as a Sars case.

Credibility gap

Many people believe the problem is more serious than the authorities say.

That might explain why a lot of people seem to be avoiding eating in restaurants in Shanghai now.

The normally crowded place where I go at lunchtimes to eat jiaozi, or Chinese ravioli, is half empty.

At least 50% of people in Hong Kong are wearing protective face masks

There are new revelations of an apparently far larger number of cases, which are being treated in military hospitals in Beijing, not included in the government's statistics.

It's just the latest episode in a saga of secrecy surrounding the disease.

For weeks and weeks, officials failed to release any update to the death toll from Sars down in Guangdong province, where the disease appears to have started.

They were still saying five had died, when various sources were telling me that the virus had claimed about 30 lives, a figure that was subsequently confirmed.

Openness of a kind

Back at the news conference in Shanghai, my masked-up colleague and I have become a focus of attention for all the press photographers, busy snapping away at us.

I doubt that any of the official newspapers here will want to print photos of a foreigner wearing a face mask in Shanghai, even if it is explained that he is nobly doing so to protect Shanghai people's health from any nastiness he may have brought in from Hong Kong.

Pictures, after all, speak louder than words.

But soon I have to eat my words, or should I say my pictures.

A couple of days later, the news conference is shown on local television, including my masked questions. And my image is plastered over at least one local news magazine.

It's openness of a kind, yes. But many experts are now saying that China needs to do a lot more to reveal the true situation - to save lives and help the scientific community quickly get to grips with this still little understood disease.

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