Op-Ed: I had a ringside seat for the SARS virus in 2003. Here’s how this coronavirus is different (via latimesopinion)
In my early days of living in Beijing in the fall of 2002, I found a cheap way to improve my Chinese: riding in a taxi for hours each night so I could chat with the drivers, who offered an inexpensive master class in regional dialects. One night that December, as a cab dropped me off at my apartment, I was in a delirious haze. Soon the coughing began. I slept more than I was awake, always with a feverish dream.
Living in Beijing during SARS — and for more than a decade afterward — has put a sharp edge on the sensations of this strange moment, when another new coronavirus is sickening thousands of people.What is apparent first is the ways in which China has changed since 2003. The mass mobilization of millions of people, the enterprises fired up like a single machine to make badly needed products, the transport planes full of military doctors and nurses with experience treating SARS and other viruses.
There’s a second thing you can’t help wondering as you watch: What if this outbreak had occurred in Houston? Would we have quarantined the city? Limited travel? Forced people to have their temperatures checked twice a day?This isn’t an abstract question. Not because the coronavirus is going to arrive at scale in the U.S. soon — it’s too early to know whether that will happen — but because we all live now in an age of high-speed connected networks we barely understand and struggle to manage.
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