The virus is still mutating. If a huge epidemic begins in Tortonto we will soon know the truth.
By the way, the you see that baseball teams are up in arms about going to Toronto to play? The Mayor of Toronto is upset because of SARS effect on the baseball season. One Scenenario: So the teams are forced to play in Toronto in front of empty seats and then contract the disease ... and take it home to their own cities.
By your logic the disease should have felled the Philadelphia Flyers. Let's get a grip, folks.
The outbreak in Toronto is traceable back to a single source and has not broken out of the original contact groups. The people who died are almost all elderly people with prior significant health conditions. Should people not travel to an American city during a bad flu outbreak when elderly folks are dying? Toronto is a huge city of 3 million people and significantly more walking traffic in the downtown than any U.S. city save NYC and maybe Chicago, and keep in mind downtown Toronto doesn't roll up the sidewalks at night like many U.S. cities. There have been no new cases identified outside the initial exposure group in the past week or so. Outside of the hospitals/clinics and a few panicky areas of the Chinese community north of the city you'd be hard pressed to see anyone wearing a mask.
The precautions being taken are extreme. A friend of mine is a PhD in immunology doing research at Sunnybrook Health Sciences...one of the hospitals that locked down their emergency ward. She's in a separate building with it's own ventilation system and the steps she has to go through upon entering and leaving the building are rigid, as they should be for precaution's sake.
People wonder why we had deaths here and none or few elsewhere (outside China). The reason might be that we were the first jump off point for the infection and it did look very much like a simple bad flu bug when first spotted, so yes some errors of judgement were made. The situation changed very rapidly though once the nature of the threat was realized, only a matter of days since the first cases appeared. This enabled Canadian health professionals, who are no slouches when it comes to bio research, to sound an international alarm and give other countries a heads up. No one knew what Legionnaires didease was when it first appeared, either, and it's effect was quite deadly. We're figuratively lucky that the first place in North America to get hit was a major metropolitan area with large numbers of research and teaching hospitals...if this would have occurred in my small home town on the other hand the situation may have been somewhat different.
As for the mutations, that is one thing that has med pros concerned, but the reason could be, according to my aforementioned friend, be easily explainable. If a corona virus were to splice with a common flu virus the effect could be like a random number generator inserted into the gene sequence. Troubling but not necessarily inconquerable.
Bottom line: Much of what has been reported in the media is little more than panicky scare hype. Chicken Little's everywhere. Quarantine IS working and previously healthy patients are recovering. Many foreign media types that have come to Toronto are finding the reality very different than they expected.
I don't mean to downplay the severity of the disease, and I do fear for what will happen in China and the third world if this thing gets out of hand. But even the CDC who has folks on the scene up here said the WHO announcement was over the edge. Personally, I'll trust the experts from CDC-Atlanta than some U.N. toadies on a panel in Geneva who didn't even talk to anyone locally before they came out with their travel warning. There is suspician that they were under pressure from China to make this move to take the focus away from Hong Kong and the mainland. This is not impossible...China is getting raked over the coals in east Asia by neighbors who are furious they sat on the problem for as long as they did, and then blatently lied when caught out.
Toronto is safe. I don't have SARS. I have the same condition my (Chinese) doctor has - SARRP - Severe Allergic Reaction to Panicky People.
Nice weekend all!