High anxiety grips Beijing as SARS casts shadow over May Day activities

Do not breathe without a mask, do not kiss your children, do not have sex, do not go out to eat, shop, play or swim

Do not breathe without a mask, do not kiss your children, do not have sex, do not go out to eat, shop, play or swim. And if a feeling of panic begins to creep up, please call a counsellor (no visits, please).

That is the message the Beijing government is putting out as citizens sit at home over the May Day holiday watching TV and reading the text-messaged reports of the daily death and disease toll.

In Guangdong province, the authorities have arrested 13 people for spreading rumours about SARS via the Internet and mobile phone short messages.

Still, no one is going around a wheel barrow saying "bring out your dead yet" but with new cases still running at 100 per day, the government will have to wait at least another week to see if the new measures introduced a week ago have been effective at stopping infections spreading. It takes around two weeks for SARS to incubate.

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Over 11,000 are under quarantine and at least three psychological counselling hot-lines have been set up to help nervous Beijing residents deal with what specialists term the "SARS-fear" syndrome.

"Because of the highly infectious nature of the disease, we can't conduct face-to-face talks with patients," says Cong Zong, a psychiatrist with the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. "However, there is so much anxiety and fear among people that we need to intervene. Using the phone is one way of doing it."

"I received 20 phone calls in the last hour," said one staffer from the Psychological Health Institute, who gave her name as Liu. "When people under quarantine call, I try to explain it's not personal, just a precautionary measure."

But of course it is very personal when you get sick with a deadly and incurable virus in an isolation ward where no visits are permitted. According to acting mayor Wang Qishan, more than 100 SARS-treatment medical institutions have been cordoned off in Beijing.

More than 42 per cent of capital dwellers say they feel increasingly terrified by the unabated spread of the disease, according to one survey by an Information Research Institute.

The draconian measures ordered by the government are inflaming fears. The government made it clear citizens were safest at home and state television is running movie marathons.

Shopping centres in Beijing are forbidden from holding sales promotion. Public gatherings are discouraged and some health experts have advised newlywed couples to postpone conceiving their babies. Another report said the divorce rate had dropped during the crisis.

Outings in the surrounding countryside of Beijing have been banned for fear that visitors from the capital might spread the disease in the impoverished rural parts of the country. Even swimming pools have been closed and in this correspondent's residential compound no outside visitors or their cars are permitted to enter.

To mark Labour Day, leaders bestowed annual "model worker" medals on doctors, nurses and scientists - dubbed "white-clothed angels" and "fearless warriors" in the SARS battle - not that party pomp took the edge off anxieties.

China's Vice-President Zeng Qinghong, one of the country's most influential men, warned cadres in a Labour Day speech that their political work to fight SARS would have an impact on the "overall state of reform, development and stability" in China.

The economy is going to be badly hit. The Guangdong fair ended a day ahead of schedule with orders worth only $4.42 billion, just a quarter of the $16.8 billion booked last year.

Last year, 87 million May Day travellers spent 33 billion yuan ($3.9 billion) shopping and touring during the traditional May Day Golden Week. This year most restaurants and shops simply bolted up their doors and went home after the government shortened the seven-day May Day holiday to five days and advised people against travelling.

President Hu Jintao, also party General Secretary, also urged the entire party and nation to rally around the leadership of the party's Central Committee, pool resources and form a powerful, united force against SARS.

But it is becoming clear that it was only when top party officials started falling sick, that the leadership did an about-face, sacked two top officials and began to confront the disease.

The Chinese newspaper, Southern Weekend, interviewed a professor at the Central Party School where 1,600 of the party's top officials take management and ideology courses, who said that a librarian there had contracted SARS after visiting a Beijing hospital for treatment. Now his residence and the surrounding buildings are quarantined.

The New York Times reports that SARS even passed through the heavily guarded gates of Zhongnanhai, the exclusive leadership compound in the heart of the capital, infecting the maid who works for the widow of Chen Yun, once China's Number Two.

Jiang Zemin, the recently retired party chief, has a house there and so, too, does his successor, Hu Jintao.

The authorities have quarantined an unknown number of people inside the leadership compound, as well as top executives and ministers. Most top leaders have dropped out of sight since the crisis, triggering rumours about intrigues and power struggles inside cloistered corridors of Zhongnanhai.