ABSTRACT
Long ago, Mao Zedong hearing of an epidemic in the distant provinces in the late 1950s, penned this poem:
The ‘God of Plague’ was on its long march again 50 or so years later in the form of SARS. The diffusion of this deadly virus from the People’s Republic of China to the outside world seemed to a helpless public to be a global ‘catastrophe’ in the making (see Chapter 2), if, in the ( nal analysis, only on a limited scale; WHO ( gures show that the virus had appeared in 32 countries, affected 8,422 people and led to 916 deaths. China (including the mainland, the HKSAR and Taiwan) was the worst hit, accounting for 92 per cent of the accumulated cases and 90.5 per cent of total deaths as Table 3.1 in Chapter 3 reveals. It had an immediate impact, as we suggest in Chapter 4, on economic growth, employment levels and human resources and more broadly, day-to-day social activities.
