The Transformation of Hong Kong

The Transformation of Hong Kong

A drastic change came over Hong Kong during my supposed three month long business trip. This was not my first time in Hong Kong since I work for Walt Disney Imagineering and my team of engineers had been spending years planning the creation of the fourth Disney resort in Hong Kong. I had arrived in Hong Kong in mid-February 2003. My coworkers and I were staying at the Island Shangri-La which is located in the heart of Hong Kong, overlooking Victoria Harbor.

My first week and a half in Hong Kong could be classified as normal. Restaurants were packed when I would go to dinner with coworkers. Starbucks was bustling in the morning as I got coffee on my way to work, and Pacific Place, an amazing entertainment and shopping complex on the Island, was full of people from open to close. The only thing that might have seemed unusual to the outsider was the occasional individual wearing a surgical mask, which having spent a lot of time in Hong Kong and Japan, I came to realize was common in Asia. If an individual was sick they protected themselves and others by wearing the mask. All in all, this appeared as if it was going to be a typical stay in Hong Kong until the first week of March when things changed.

I distinctly remember the news reports which appeared about this mysterious disease that had appeared in the Guangdong Province of China beginning in November 2002. I remember my daughter worrying about me traveling to Asia with this unknown "killer." Yet, I reassured her that there was nothing to worry about since Hong Kong was quite a distance away from Guangdong Province. It turns out, that I should have taken my daughter a bit more seriously because, in hindsight, I know that on F...

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...on again if there was a major world health concern. It is hoped that if SARS occurs again, as it has in isolated cases, that the societies of the world will not be thrown into as drastic of an upheaval as I experienced in Hong Kong in the late winter and spring of 2003.

Now that the threat of the disease is past, Hong Kong is much more like it should be. When my wife traveled with me on my most recent business trip she did not have to face the health checkpoints at the airport nor the deserted streets and paranoia of two years ago. Life in Hong Kong appears "normal" now only with the memory of the modern epidemic which took some of its citizens' lives. The world now contains 774 fewer people due to the progress of the recent epidemic, SARS.

* www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/faq.htm

Sources of Information:

www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/

www.sarsreference.com/