Chinese theatres, bars closed in Sars crackdown

Beijing yesterday imposed sweeping measures to close down theatres, discos, internet bars and other places of entertainment as the city’s total of Sars cases climbed higher.

Officials said it would be impossible otherwise ”to meet the demands needed to fight Sars”.

All classes in Beijing’s junior and secondary schools have also been cancelled.

A week after the central leadership ended a cover-up in the capital and the health minister was sacked, the number of confirmed cases of Sars has more than tripled to 1 114. Yesterday saw 126 cases reported, and 56 deaths have been reported so far.

Students whose colleges have closed and migrant labourers whose construction sites have stopped work continued to head for their homes in the provinces in spite of official appeals to stay put and avoid spreading the virus.

China’s second city, Shanghai, though less seriously affected, is also clamping down on nightlife. ”They are closing 50% of the city’s bars,” said a nightclub owner, ”starting with the busiest ones. But then the less busy ones will become more crowded, so we expect them to close those, too.”

China’s reported national tally rose to 2 914 infections with 131 dead so far, but no one believes this is the real total.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has briefed foreign diplomats in Shanghai that their real fear is not the cities but the vast rural areas where health facilities are mostly unable to cope.

The inland province of largely rural Shanxi now has 214 cases with nine deaths.

The central government still appears to have difficulty persuading local authorities to take tough action. The health ministry yesterday issued an urgent notice to hospitals to take the Sars threat more seriously.

”The notice demands that all hospitals draw on the experience and lessons learned by Guangdong, Beijing and other areas in fighting Sars,” the official Xinhua news agency said.

Hundreds of construction workers were working around the clock on a 1,000-bed isolation camp for Sars victims on Beijing’s northern outskirts.

With overseas tour groups almost entirely absent, sights such as the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven were nearly deserted.

In Hong Kong, 12 more patients were reported yesterday to have died from the virus, but the total of new infections was 16, the lowest for a month.

The mood lifted slightly in the hard-pressed territory. ”We are beginning to realise we have to try to live as normally as we can,” said a local financial adviser.

As Taiwan suffered its first death from the virus, the island said it would ban visitors from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada for two weeks.

”Fighting the epidemic is like fighting a war. We face an invisible enemy,” the prime minister, Yu Shyi-kun, told a news conference.

A 48-year-old man quarantined in Taiwan’s Ho Ping hospital hanged himself after being told his family might have Sars, doctors said.

Cable television also showed a woman in a mask and hospital gown trying to throw herself from a window before being pulled back in.

In London, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director-general of the WHO, told the BBC that the world still had ”a window of opportunity” to avoid Sars spreading to new countries.

Defending the WHO advisory ban on travel to Toronto, she said that ”in order to have a chance globally to avoid this new disease becoming a continuous threat and a continuous challenge to all of us, we must take the precautionary measures now”.

Sars around the world