The price of SARS secrecy.

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday, April 30:

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Even as the World Health Organization declared on Monday that the SARS virus had apparently peaked in places, the epidemic was still rampant in China. The Chinese have only themselves _ more precisely, their government _ to blame. China is learning, the hard way, the price of secrecy. It is suffering, and will suffer even more, because it chose to deny and conceal the deadly new pneumonia-like epidemic called SARS, first detected in Guangdong Province months ago.

The price of that silence, of that denial while SARS cases were piling up, is still being measured in lives lost and a reeling economy. In economic terms, the message being pounded home to Chinese leaders could be as devastating as the fallout from the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. Restaurants, theaters and hotels are nearly deserted. Schools are shut down. Travelers have canceled bookings. The aviation industry is swooning. Thousands are quarantined in hospitals, college dormitories, even a construction site.

And it is not over, maybe not even peaking.

There are some signs that the Chinese are beginning to understand _ albeit under intense international pressure _ the value of openness. After denying the problem for months, thus allowing the disease to gain a disastrous foothold in their country, the Chinese finally admitted a few days ago that they had grossly underreported the numbers who were suffering from the illness. And, even more unusual, they apologized. In the past few days, the mayor of Beijing and the national health minister were fired for mishandling the epidemic.

But that's only scapegoating, a political solution for a problem that goes much deeper, to the core of the Chinese culture. Those officials were only doing what Chinese bureaucrats have often done when confronted with an unpleasant reality. They denied. They kept quiet. They hoped it would go away, or at least that no outsiders would find out.