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I realise I havn’t been telling y’all what to think lately, so here it goes.
SARS - Not great, but not terrible. The SARS virus isn’t that infectious and it seems like it is containable if people are on the look out for it. This means that people in Developed countries don’t have much to worry about.
China will continue to have a large breakout and excpect the News to continue to get worse for the next couple of months, but then due to the draconian measures everybody is taking it should die down by the time I am due to come back to China to teach in the fall. Right now India is scaring me, the goverment there seems to have no interest in accuratly reporting SARS cases.
As for personally living with SARS, it is all getting rather routine. Most people have stopped wearing masks around the city and it FeiDian isn’t always the main topic of conversation. The most annoying recent devlopment has been that most housing complexs are closed down. In China everything has a wall around it. At my housing complex, the old retired people sit at the front gate and suspicously watch every one who comes in. Now they have been given red armbands, that I presume say “SARS protection squad,” and look even more suspiciously at people coming in. If they don’t know you, you can’t get in. Or at least that’s how I think it works, No body bothered to tell me.
The other big thing that’s happening, is that some dude came back from beijing and ran away from quarintine when the police tried to stop him. Now they ave all these posters up over town, that have a fuzzy picture of he guy. They tell you if you see him to either stop him or run the hell away so you don’t get SARS.