Posted on 04/22/2003 1:22:15 PM PDT by yonif
BEIJING (AP) _ The urgent radio message went out over the Beijing airwaves: "Taxi drivers who had a middle-aged male passenger dressed in a long green military-style coat should contact transportation authorities immediately."
The reason for the urgency: The customer had the SARS virus and officials were fearful that the contaminated cars could spread the deadly bug around the huge city that's already struggling to contain an outbreak.
A 24-hour manhunt ensued for two drivers who picked up the man who was later hospitalized, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday, the latest sign of how jittery officials have become about the threat of severe acute respiratory syndrome.
About 35,000 taxis matched the rough description the patient gave of the cabs he rode in and nearly 295 taxi agencies use such vehicles, Xinhua said, citing Beijing's Transportation Bureau. It said about 40,000 drivers are licensed to drive the taxis.
After 13 hours of searching, officials found one driver on Sunday, Xinhua said. Four hours later, the second one was located, said the agency, which didn't provide details about how the drivers were found.
Phone calls to the Transportation Bureau went unanswered on Tuesday afternoon.
Xinhua said the Transportation Bureau's chief, Ding Baosheng, has added a new item to the SARS prevention to-do list, which already includes washing hands frequently, avoiding crowded places and wearing a mask.
Ding urged the public to be sure to get a receipt at the end of taxi trips so that cars that might be SARS-infected can be tracked down quickly.
We are witnessing the beginning of something very significant. Your perspective and reports are very valuable to us. I bet our CDC doesn't even have as much information as you have. You might even consider emailing them with your updates. Here is a link to their online contact form:
http://www.cdc.gov/netinfo.htm
I don't know what good it would do, but they might appreciate your information. I know I do.
Good work. Keep sending them your information. I am sure they are interested, even if they don't respond.
When the first news of SARS came here, people all over started buying up all the antibiotics they could ... They were taking them to prevent SARS, but most people here haven't the foggiest idea how those work, or what their purpose is. If they get sniffles, they take them till the sniffles go away--if that is 2, 3, 5 or 10 days. Then they stop. Building up their antibiotic resistence!
Oh my, what a disaster waiting to happen. This information is simply unavailable anywhere else. Keep posting, maybe a thread from time to time with your updates. Information like this shouldn't be buried in other SARS threads. It deserves its own thread.
Thanks for posting.
Read post #5, and subsequent posts. Then you might want to use your ping list on this. Valuable stuff.
Yeah, it is for news articles, but you can post things like personal reports too. It's called a vanity. If you are on the news/activism main page, up in the right hand corner near your name and your mail, there is a link that says "post". Just click that and a posting page will appear. There is a place for the url and all that, but you can leave most of that stuff blank if you are just posting your own report.
The only thing you have to put in is a title and a topic, like news, or politics, or whatever. Click the Choose button by the topics field and check one of the topics. (If it is something earthshattering, click Breaking News.) Then scroll to the end and click Okay, and it will take you back to the posting page. There is a place for the "article" and also another field for your comments, but you can leave the comments field empty.
Could also post pictures if knew what to do for that on this sight. I'm pretty computer literate, but I'm not sure of that procedure here.
An image has to live on the Internet already before you can post it here. Then you just link to the image address in the posting field, and your pic will appear.
If you have the address of a pic, use this html tag:
< img src="http://www.freerepublic.com/images/frlogo.gif" >
But take away the spaces by the < and >. The only space should be between the img and the src, and the address is in quotation marks.
Posting the above html tag will look like this when we see it:
You can get the address of a pic on the web by right clicking it and selecting Copy Link Location (I use netscape, but Internet Explorer might say something else if you use that.) Right click on the the FR pic then paste the address you get to see what I mean.
Oh, and also, if you want to have a paragraph break in some text, just type < p >, without the spaces.
Looking forward to your posts, and be sure to ping me!
Dang, howlin, I meant Read Post #18.
And be on the lookout for Ma Li's other posts on the SARS threads.
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