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At Issue

With Philip Shaw

SARS Is Changing the Way We Live

Tuesday, April 8, 2003

I was in Hong Kong this past winter. Singapore too. Little did I know a couple of months later, we’d be talking about a disease from there nobody had ever heard of. But here we are, SARS seems to be everywhere. Even in far off Chatham-Kent, people are looking over their shoulders.
SARS has killed more than 90 people in Asia and Canada, and sickened at least 2,400 in more than a dozen countries. As of last Monday, Health Canada reported 226 probable or suspect cases of SARS in Canada. All of Canada's SARS related deaths have occurred in Ontario. At the start of this week, there were 188 probable and suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Ontario.
When I first heard of it, there were shock waves in the family. They are used to me coming back from Asia with an assortment of maladies, but it seemed this time, I wasn’t alone. Having touched down in Hong Kong, boarding another plane and quickly flying to Singapore on the way to Bangladesh, I certainly could have been in the line of fire. Luckily for me, I wasn’t in the line of fire. The virus fortunately was transferred to humans in southern China, sometime after I departed Asia.
It is something that came out of nowhere. We have Iraq. We have our economy. We have our problems in Chatham-Kent. But nobody ever thought we’d be worried about a weekend in Toronto. Over the last week, I’ve heard concerns from people about family reunions, school trips and business junkets to hog town. Viruses spread so easily; nobody wants to go there.
The economic impact of such a scare could be significant. Think of a world where nobody wants to go outside. Nobody wants to travel. That might be a bit extreme but the effect on economic growth will be obvious. Economic growth rates in Asia are typically over 5%. SARS could cut into that with reverberations flowing throughout the rest of the world.
An easier picture to understand is the economic impact SARS is having on Toronto. It is not the destination of choice at the present time for wayward explorers. Just last week, a medical convention was canceled over the threat of SARS. This is the public face of the SARS debacle. What makes the impact even worse is the private action of individuals trying to avoid it. That economic impact will not be measured.
The suddenness of the SARS outbreak is partly what sets it apart. Breast cancer and AIDS will kill a lot more people this year, but they are the devil we know. SARS came so quickly and from such an exotic location, it has become the media’s disease du jour. That shouldn’t override the seriousness of disease. SARS has killed 11 people in Ontario as of last Monday with another 180 suspected probable and suspected cases.
On my trip to Asia, I took a few wrong turns. The first one occurred at the Sarnia airport. It was there where I was informed my plane had been cancelled to Newark, New Jersey. So I could either go home and try again in two days or be re-routed through Hong Kong. I chose the latter. So off I flew to Vancouver to connect with my flight to Hong Kong.
So when I first heard about SARS, I thought Vancouver would be a hot bed of SARS incubation. Vancouver is both a jumping off point for Hong Kong and destination from. But so far, B.C. seems immune. A lack of business is compelling the closure of Vancouver's SARS clinic. Public health officials have decided to shut down the SARS clinic because only four people were brought into the clinic in its first three days in operation.
I wish I could say the same thing for Ontario. You don’t have to go too far to see SARS being manifested in our own lives. Last week, I went into a local department store only to stumble over a hospital mask laying in the parking lot. The next day I passed Four Counties Hospital in Newbury, only to see a sign, saying "No Visitors, SARS Alert." There are similar concerns in Chatham and Wallaceburg hospitals.
I'm hoping this virus fizzles out. It makes me think of that old saying, "out of sight, out of mind." In many ways, that’s where a lot of us are, only in reverse. AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa seems so far away. But SARS is in Toronto and everybody understands that. Hopefully, as our days disappear into weeks, and public health officials continue their work, we'll get this thing under control.




Philip Shaw, farms 830 acres near Dresden, Ontario. He holds a Masters of Agricultural Economics and Business Degree from the University of Guelph and is a well-known commentator on agricultural issues in print, on radio and over satellite in Canada and the United States. In the Chatham-Kent Times, Phil will use his frank and forthright writing style to address political and economic issues from the local to the international stage. He is a keen observer of political life at all levels, reads widely and has travelled the world to gather fodder for his column. See what's At Issue this week.