I don’t live in Canada, but I’m interested in knowing how everyone is coping with SARS over there.
It’s getting freakishly scary here in HK because the fatalities are piling up like crazy, 12 yesterday and 7 today.
Looks like we’re in it for the long-term. Any chance the virus has or will mutate any time soon? And how does this mutation happen, especially over such a short-period of time? 
In Toronto, for the most part it is business as usual. More anti-bacterial soap is available everywhere and people are washing their hands much more frequently. Especially if you’ve been in public.
Once in a very rare while, you see someone wearing a mask on the subway – but that is pretty unusual.
Hospitals is where you’ll see the most activity – closures, temporary layoffs of non-essential staff etc. and controlled entrances. Anyone coming into a hosptial gets his/her temperature taken. If you don’t work their and don’t need to be there, you are asked to leave. Medical staff wear masks, but a lot office staff that doesn’t come into contact with patients don’t wear masks.
Mostly, it’s affecting Asian run businesses. Restaurants are going bankrupt and Asians are complainging of racism because they are often treated as “plague carriers.” Churches have had to change the way they conduct services – waffers ar given by hand, not placed in the mouth. And the "peace be with you handshake has been replaced by a smile and bow.
I’ve been in two other large Ontario own and there is no noticeable change in general public behaviour.
I think we’re up to 14 deaths, total, now. All in the Toronto area.
I’m 45 minutes outside of Toronto, and my SO works for the IT department at a longterm care hospital. I am not allowed to visit him at work, or even step foot inside the hospital. Every time before he goes inside the building (only one entrance is open) he needs to answer a check list of questions. Every time.
All of the hospitals in the area are pretty much the same. There have been no reported cases in our region, so we’re not really too freaked out at all.
We joke about it to make it less serious. For example, the other night we were talking about what we wanted for dinner. “How about Chinese?” “Mmmm, yah, I’ll take a plate of SARS fried rice please.”
Oh, if you want a better idea you can visit the Toronto Star. One of the major newspapers. Most of the public’s “unease” is focussed in Toronto – where most of the cases have been reported.
I don’t believe there’s a factual answer to your question of how Canadians are coping. Everyone is being affected very differently:
I’m personally unaffected, other than getting very scared looks from whoever is around me when I have an asthma attack. I have things that affect me personally much more severely to cope with, so I just don’t think about it much. I don’t know anybody who actually has the disease. The closest I come to even knowing someone who is quarantined is the son of a colleague.
She has taken to working from home because her son’s school is under quarantine. Fortunately, we work for a company where that’s an option. There are several schools that have been shut down in Toronto, and I don’t know what the parents who don’t have a work from home option are doing. I think it’s mainly high schools, so possibly just leaving the children home alone, as they aren’t that young.
A friend who owns a sushi restaurant in an Asian mall is being badly hit by SARS which is stupidly being seen as a specifically Asian problem. She’s worrying a lot about making payroll, but has noticed that traffic is not nearly as low as it was when the SARS scare first became big news. Still, this is going to put a long term hurt on her business financiallly.
A colleague’s wife just had a baby. They sent him home from the hospital a couple hours after his daughter was born and wouldn’t let him, or anyone else visit his wife and newborn child for the two days they remained in the hospital. This was fairly emotionally wrenching but not particularly physically threatening. They coped with it via long phone calls and my colleague making trips to the hospital to stand outside her first floor window and peer in at his child.
My landlady is in the hospital with a broken hip and has been since before the SARS outbreak. When she first went in, she was making good progress, in good spirits, etc. But now, she’s allowed a one hour visit from an immediate family member once a week, so she’s bored, lonely, emotionally distanced and her medical progress has slowed considerably. I’d be hard-pressed to say that she is coping with it. It’s actually dragging her down considerably.
My father is supposed to go and see an oncologist in Vancouver but may not get to because the visit will involve a surgery that may be de-scheduled. He’s coping with it by trying to remember that the expected time to see the oncologist was 8 weeks, which would have been medically fine, and he got an appointment in 3 weeks, so even if his appointment is slid back awhile, he’s still got plenty of time.
I’d say the vast - though ever-shrinking - majority of people are in my situation. It’s not really affecting them at all, and when they aren’t watching the news or chatting at the water cooler, they aren’t thinking about it. Most people who are affected are affected by the precautions, not the disease itself.
Hopefully KarlGauss will eventually be able to pop in and update the SDMB. I’ve had a few emails from him; he is literally in the thick of it. They just had 4 medical personnel in the hospital where he helps run the SARS team come down with SARS after caring for a patient, despite isolation suits! Good thoughts for him from us all here, please.
That reminds me, my dentist teaches at the dental college. One of his number one pet peeves it when he sees students wearing masks and gloves who then absent-mindedly reach under their masks to scratch around their mouths and noses because the mask “got a little itchy.”
Like Harli, I’m about 45 minutes from Toronto, and there are no SARS cases here, so I’m not particularly worried. I haven’t really been in an environment where there was any risk of getting SARS (the Student Health Clinic at my school turns back anyone who presents with a fever or other symptoms, and haven’t actually seen any possible cases), and I haven’t been to a hospital.
One encouraging thing is that every known case of SARS or possible/probable SARS can be traced back to an original patient, or doctors treating the patient, etc, at least last I heard. There haven’t been isolated cases popping up in “unexpected” places.
I basically don’t think of it unless it gets mentionned. I haven’t had to face any weird medical precautions (though once I start work in Mississauga I likely will have certain procedures to follow), so although it’s scary to hear about the cases that exist, and new cases and quarantined schools and apartment buildings, it’s still a fairly distant thing for me.
You can probably expect some cases to come to light in hamilton , some individual who had sars broke quarintine and took the go bus to hamilton and back.
Declan
Everything’s fairly quiet so far here in Ottawa. I’m leaving for San Diego (Ottawa-Chicago-San Diego) in a couple days for a week, returning via Pearson. Normally, I’m fairly stoic when it comes to those things. But I’ll have to admit I’ve been thinking about this one. Probably worrying needlessly. I’m even bringing a N-95 mask with me for the return leg. Whether I will be using it or not at Pearson and on the Toronto-Ottawa segment will probably depend on my mood:D, on whether I’m the only one wearing one (would definitely not wish to commit a fashion faux pas :D) and on developments in the intervening week.
omni I took a train from Toronto to London on Saturday and in the entire train station there were only two people wearing masks: A (very) old lady and her daughter. No one really seemed to care much. VIA staff never batted an eye. The little old lady didn’t cover her nose with the mask though because she found it too difficult/yucky to breathe through it all the time.
So I don’t think anyone will consider it a faux pas if you have one. If anyone thinks you’re being a boob, I doubt anyone would say anything, because everyone understands that it’s all rather disconcerting. You won’t be the only uneasy traveller I’m sure.
My dentist’s wife did bring some masks along when she had to fly to a conference in the U.S. The idea of recycled air seemed more icky than usual. She did eventually don the mask when the person behind her started sneezing (although she said he was popping Claritin, so it was probably just allergies) and he looked pretty indignant when she did it. Otherwise, no one seemed to care.
Thanks Crayons. Actually, I won’t worry much about the faux pas, assuming that I do decide to don one. I’ve ‘dry runned’ it yesterday. Not that comfortable, I must say and a bit constraining if worn during a length of time.
Not losing any sleep over it though.
Bottom line: I’ll wing it!
Declan it wasn’t someone who “broke quarantine” it was a nurse who had taken the GO Train twice before she was diagnosed as “probable.”
Health officials say the “risk is low” for the other passengers, but they are still hoping to track down the six people she sat with. (Three coming there, three going.)
The nurse is receiving treament now but wasn’t at the time she was commuting to and from work. Saturday is when she was considered a “probable” case, she rode the train Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. She had initially passed SARS screening.
It wasn’t a case of a sick, symptomatic person “breaking quarantine.” It was a health worker who wasn’t aware she was infected.
Then it got garbled on our end of the news spectrum, sorry for the false alarm.
Declan
I am also 45 minutes from Toronto. While our hospital has not seen a SARS case, we have to wear full gown, gloves and mask in the ER and might for the next 3-6 months. It has made my job very difficult as it is really hard to transfer patients between hospitals; transfers must be approved by a special committee on a case by case basis. Also, many sick people are not coming to the emergency room. These two things are probably killing more people than SARS itself, which has largely targeted those who already have a lot of morbidity. The difference between “probable” and “suspect” cases is muddy when no definitive test is available.
I’m quite close to Vancouver. We had a SARS clinic set up, but it has since been dismantled. I think there were just a few cases out here, mostly direct from Asia.
I barely hear anything about SARS anymore, except news items about China or Toronto. You’d think with the large number of Asians coming to the area we’d get it first if it was that easy to transmit, but so far so good.
Personally, I’m not too worried. Even if I somehow got it, the death rate is actually pretty low for otherwise heallthy people. I’m more likely to get hit by a car or whacked in a drive-by, at least in my neighbourhood.
The reason viruses can mutate so quickly is because they have such short generation times. That’s why there is concern that SARS, which is now spread through close-contact, could mutate to become air-born. It’s also why we need new flu vaccines every year and why its so hard to cure the common cold.
Each time a virus reproduces, mutations can be introduced. Humans evolve very slowly because our generation time is approximately 30 years. On the other hand, the generation time for a virus like HIV is about 2.6 days.
So viruses outpace us in the evolutionary arms race. The good news is that in many cases there will be a portion of the human population which is immune to a particular infection. Even if a virus manages to wipe most of us out, some of us will survive to reproduce.
Another issue is whether the virus changes significantly enough to reinfect. It will be some time before we know whether SARS is more like a cold or the chicken-pox in this respect. If it doesn’t change significantly from generation to generation, we will eventually build up an immunity and the pandemic will die down.
I hope that sheds some light on things.
Actually the confusion is understandable because of the sloppy way the media has been reporting. (Which is becoming a pet peeve of mine.)
The Toronto Star started the story by saying “a nurse being treated for SARS rode the GO train!” Which sounds like she was sick, in the isolation ward of the hospital, and then somehow sneaked out of the hospital to take a train ride. It’s only 2/3 of the way into the long article that they clarify that she is being treated now but was not at the time she was on the GO Train. (The hospital did however, discover her fever when she arrived to work on the Tuesday she took the train. That’s why she didn’t go home by train.)
I’ve notice that the Star has updated the story on-line so it no longer starts off that way. Now it says that an “infected nurse rode the train.” It is scary that an infected health care worker was out and about, but they are considering the risk to be low, although there is concern for her immediate seatmates.
I only wanted to clarify because you have to be a real ass to put others at risk by breaking quarantine, and the nurse (who I’m sure knows the dangers well) did not do such a stupid thing.
Cite? According to WHO, SARS is a coronovirus and as far as I am aware these viruses are not air based. Even if the current SARS mutates, it will still be a form of coronovirus and not air based.
I live in Toronto and I can’t say it affects me much at all. I’ve only been directly affected twice: a friend broke a date with me because she wasn’t comfortable being in crowds and, worse, Opera Mississauga cancelled their entire run of Il Trovatore, presumably not so much because of lack of audience but because the visiting soloists got cold feet.
So - annoying, but hardly major.
Some friends are in the hospitality industry and are hurting. For example, occupancy rates at the downtown hotels, normally about 75% this time of year, are now half that. Two major conventions have been cancelled.