Swine flu hit the news here with the same force as back home in the UK. Pamphlets were handed out with government advice on self-protection, but since the initial shock and concern H1N1 has largely fallen out of sight. However, there remain signs of caution. Plastic sheeting (sticky back plastic) has been applied over the buttons and controls of many public appliances, including telephones, lifts and ticket machines. Health forms are filled in at Customs and passengers’ temperatures are taken at all major train stations and border crossings. One doctor told me that his workload has almost doubled due to the extra paperwork required for patients who enter the hospital with a fever. In a single night the doctor deals with up to and over a hundred feverish patients but with only a thin surgical mask to protect him he doesn’t seem concerned. Actual cases of Swine Flu in Guangzhou have been few, but the memory of SARS is still hanging over the residents’ heads.
Precautions on the Hong Kong side seem, inevitably, somewhat more professional. Since SARS the Hong Kong SAR has been routinely testing the temperature of every traveller back and cross the border and considering the thousands of day-trip visitors that is no small undertaking. Customs officers and locals often resort to wearing a surgical mask when suffering from respiratory problems and in winter the sea of masked faces can look like an army of surgeons travelling to work on the underground MTR. During the inital outbreak of Swine Flu trains and planes leaving or arriving in Hong Kong were delayed for up to four or five hours following the discovery of ill or feverish travellers. Whether these precautions are enough is a matter for the doctors and governments to consider, but the popular joke in China is that Swine Flu is not worth worrying about when road accidents kill six hundred Chinese everyday. It is an ancient Chinese habit, or wisdom even, that they do not worry about what they cannot control, and so after a temporary blip of interest H1N1 slips back into the vast abyss of things that they cannot change and life goes on almost as normal, simply with more premature trips to the hospital.
July 4th, 2009 at 2:19 am
As a chinese guy who have lived in mainland and HK for years, I know there are different attitudes from both sides. For mainland China, it wants to make a good impression for overseas after Tibet’event. It tries to open their “some part” of transparency and let everybody lived overseas know what attitude it is, because chinese goverment hid the patient’s condition during the period of SARS, it caused many people died due to they did not know how serious the situation it was. What chinese goverment did has been blamed from different oversea media. For HK, they are really scared of H1N1, the pain of SARS hurt them so deeply, SARS was a disaster for HK,many local people got it and died, nobody traveled to HK, as a tourism city,tourism is monumental for HK,so the economic went down, HK became a death city during the period of SARS. They do not want H1N1 become second “SARS”.
In conclusion,even mainland and HK both keep a strict watch to H1N1, but H1N1 just is a stage for mainland’s goverment to show their performance. That is an essence different.