Taiwan Gov. SARS Panic Traps 1000 People in Taipei Hospital [first hand Freeper report]

I am currently in Taipei, where my sister-in-law is a nurse at Hoping Municipal Hospital. This is the place where 7 SARS cases were discovered three days ago. Yesterday afternoon, after earlier claiming that the hospital would remain open and that the situation was under control, Taipei officials suddenly quarantined the entire hospital forbidding any staff, patients, or even visitors from leaving.

News reports showed people shouting and throwing messages from windows demanding to be set free. One man shouted, "I have no symptoms, I haven't been around anyone with symptoms, I have children coming home from school soon. Who is going to take care of them?"

Many visitors and staff jumped to freedom from first storey windows. This included my sister-in-law. For several hours last night, we sat with her and urged her not to report back to this potential "hell hole." On the phone with co-workers who were still trapped inside, she discovered that conditions were horrible inside. The AC had been turned off and there was not enough water, sanitary facilities, or beds to maintain a reasonably healthy environment for the over 1000 people inside.

Finally, my sister-in-law received a call from the hospital personnel officer--return tonight or lose your job and be fined $2000 (US equiv.). At that point, she packed her bag and returned, thinking that at least she might be performing some civic duty in helping the sick.

That turned out not to be the case. Today, this entire affair looks more and more like a political ploy designed to demonstrate a "tough attitude" from Chen Shuei-Bian's government and to embarrass Taipei's KMT party Mayor Ma (who will run against Chen next year). Specifically, it turns out that all but a handful of patients were transferred out of Hoping Municipal and there is no need for hundreds of non-infected nurses to remain there.

Moreover--and this is the truly revealing part -- nurses and other staff who were either on vacation or who had already tested negative for any illness were required to report back to the hospital, apparently to simply sit there in a show of government "determination."

This morning, a group of nurses painted banners and attempted to tell their story to news media outside the hospital doors. After a few minutes they were forced back inside the hospital by police and other officials. My sister-in-law is in contact with us via cell phone. She says that hospital officials have now shut down their access to television.

Her superiors inside the hospital have told her that they have no idea when they will be released. It could be two weeks, it could be longer.

Everyone understands the seriousness of SARS. But this action by Taiwan's health ministry seems clearly to be based either on panic or on the need to score political points with a frightened population. There was no reason not to allow healthy people to return home, and there was certainly no reason to force healthy people to report back to a place where they might contract the disease.

No, hold on. In many many instances, health officials have already sent people who *may* have been exposed home to their families for voluntary quarantine. In fact, they have already sent people with fevers home, even when there are others at home.

In this case, however, they've imposed a much more draconian rule, one that I believe--and I think most medical experts would believe--is unnecessary.

And regarding the 10 day thing, every report I've read says that symptoms will show up somewhere between 2 and 10 days.

If we adopt the kind of measures taken by the Taiwan government, pretty soon we'll simply be quarantining everyone--except for political leaders, I suspect.

There are unsubstantiated rumors of horrific transmission but the fact is that the known infections of medical professionals were before SARS was properly identified in that hospital, or people who failed to follow proper protocol (a respirator isn't a cure all, and depending on how the disease transmits it might be completely meaningless). All you have to do is look at the numbers, SARS has been around for around 6 months, 3 of that basically undetected, in that time it has infected thousands of people in a dozen or so cities and killing hundreds. A standard flu outbreak that we see every single year in that same time period will have traveled around the world infecting millions and killing thousands.

You have to understand how contagions work, there's three important elements: how is it transmitted, how is it received, how many cells does it take to infect 50% of the time. Disease can be transmitted by exhalation, in snot, in sneezes, via blood, via mucus membranes (which makes them an STD), via feces and urine and some even come out in sweat; each disease has a couple of methods, each method has a different level of contagiousness. Diseases can then be received via pretty much that same list, one interesting thing to note is that just because a disease transmits via one method doesn't mean it can be received in that method, an exhaled disease might have to be received via blood polution; again each method has a different level of contagiousness and it drops if there must be a cross over from transmission to reciept. Finally you've got the pure number game, how many cells does it take to infect, Ebola is a 1 cell infect that's one of the reasons it's the single most dangerous disease on the planet, most illnesses take thousands and maybe millions of disease cells to infect a new person. These are important to keep in mind when judging how "well" SARS is overcoming certain defenses, if SARS isn't transmitted by inhaling it then respirators will not impede its progress. Given the story from the nurse in Toronto it would seem that SARS comes out in sweat, this isn't a highly effective transmission method though that might not be the only method. I haven't seen much on it's receipt method and I haven't seen anything on cell count. But, again, we can look at the raw numbers and we know this is not a highly infectious disease, so it's probably got a tough receipt method and/ or a high cell count to infect.

China has a crappy medical system, the GOOD hospitals are running with capabilities we had in the 50s, the fact that they haven't managed to contain it within their own hospitals shows just how backwards the nation really is. Look at Toronto, they completely screwed the pooch left a SARS patient in an emergency room for 12 hours where he had the opportunity to infect hundreds of people who already weren't terribly healthy in the first place (you don't find healthy people in emergency rooms). And yet once they actually collated their feces things are being contained, the new infection rate in Toronto is dropping and there's good reason to believe that SARS will have run it's course in Toronto in another 2 or 3 weeks. I think the Chinese are trying to be careful, but they don't know what they're doing and even if they do they don't have the proper equipment to do their job right.

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