China takes no chances with swine flu

As she approached the immigration counter at Beijing’s international airport at 7 a.m. Sunday, bleary-eyed after flying all night from Bali, Lucia Rocio heard the agitated whispering of the Chinese officials.

Mexican passport. Mexican passport.

Rocio was pulled out of line and taken to a small room where she was given a mask and a thermometer, which she dared not put in her mouth because it appeared to be unsterilized. After some negotiations, Rocio, who lives in Beijing and speaks some Chinese, convinced the authorities that she was not ill and in fact hadn’t been back to Mexico in three years.

“It was scary. It caused us all much stress,” said Rocio, 40, who was traveling with her husband and two children, French citizens, who were not tested.

Despite the lack of a single confirmed case of swine flu in mainland China -- and just one in Hong Kong -- the country is experiencing an epidemic of panic.

Chastened by the 2003 crisis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, known as SARS, the Chinese are taking no chances. Authorities in China and Hong Kong have enacted strict, some say draconian, measures to isolate people who might have been exposed to swine flu since the first cases were reported in Mexico weeks ago.

Hundreds of people have been quarantined here, among them 70 Mexican citizens.

The Mexican government has offered to fly home free of charge all Mexican citizens living in China. The flight to Mexico City today is scheduled to make stops in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities to pick up passengers.

China also organized an airlift to bring its citizens home from Mexico, but the flight Monday was canceled without explanation.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon in a TV interview Sunday night took a thinly disguised shot at China -- without mentioning it by name -- noting that Mexico had been open in its handling of the flu outbreak, unlike nations that concealed information during previous health crises.

He urged the world to show respect for Mexicans and said discriminatory practices by some nations stemmed from “ignorance and misinformation.”

But the quarantine appears to be popular with the Chinese public, with fresh memories of 2003 when they were singled out for quarantines.

“China learned its lessons from SARS. The government knows it has to do everything as early as possible to keep the disease out of China. Later, the costs could be enormous,” said Peng Zongchao, an expert in crisis management at Qinghua University in Beijing.

The panic revolves largely around an Aeromexico flight with 189 passengers and crew that arrived Thursday in Shanghai from Mexico City. A 25-year-old Mexican passenger later flew on to Hong Kong, where he fell ill and was diagnosed with swine flu.

Chinese authorities have cast a wide net across the country for the other passengers, people they later met, taxi drivers, hotel guests -- just about anybody within several degrees of separation who might have been exposed.

In the predawn hours Saturday morning, a Mexican family with three children, ages 6, 7 and 8, who had flown in on the Shanghai flight for a vacation, were awakened in their hotel rooms in Beijing and ordered by authorities to a quarantine hospital. They were then transferred to a shabby hotel near the Beijing airport, guarded by soldiers.

Even Mexico’s ambassador to China, Jorge Guajardo, was not permitted to see the family and five other Mexican citizens inside the hotel.

On Monday, an embassy official was stationed outside the gates in a van, talking by mobile telephone to those inside.

“We’ve brought them pizza, toys, DVDs,” said the embassy official, who asked not to be quoted by name. “But they’re getting a little bit desperate. There’s nothing to do in there.”

Mexicans are not the only tourists under quarantine. A Spanish couple on vacation in China were forced into quarantine in Nanjing over the weekend because they had shared an apartment with a passenger on the Shanghai flight.

“At first they were scared. They couldn’t understand why there were people in white spacesuits taking them away in an ambulance,” said a source at the Spanish Embassy. “The first place they were taken was so dirty they couldn’t use the bathroom. But we complained and since then they’ve been moved and treated very well.”

The Hong Kong hotel, where the 25-year-old man fell ill with swine flu, has been quarantined since Friday with 300 guests, mainly Asian businessmen, stuck inside.

“When I came down to the lobby, and saw the hotel surrounded by police cars and people with masks in the lobby, I thought this had to be a joke,” said Kevin Ireland, a 45-year-old businessman from New Delhi, who was staying down the hall from the man who fell sick. “It’s a little over the top, but considering what Hong Kong went through with SARS, we are trying to be understanding.”

The more lethal SARS crisis began in 2003 in China’s Guangdong province and caused nearly 1,000 deaths around the world and untold economic damage in Asia with travel halted and businesses closed for much of the epidemic.

The swine flu virus, recently renamed H1N1, is especially threatening to China because of the link -- however tenuous -- to pigs. China, home to nearly half of the world’s pig population, is believed to have lobbied the World Health Organization to change the name from swine flu. “Blindly blaming the outbreak of the flu on pigs and killing them in large numbers will undermine human ethics in science,” the official New China News Agency editorialized. But critics are beginning to warn that there could be more danger in overreaction.

“This is not SARS -- it’s the flu,” said Lo Wing Lok, a Hong Kong-based physician and politician. “The reaction in Hong Kong and the mainland has to do with officials trying to protect their jobs, not in protecting the public or the economy. Who is going to come to Hong Kong if they get locked up in quarantine every time somebody gets the flu?”

Besides the man who fell ill in Hong Kong, there has been only one other confirmed case of swine flu in Asia. In South Korea, a 51-year-old nun who recently arrived from Mexico was diagnosed with the illness.

The panic, however, is clearly spreading fast. The fear is evident in the return of the face masks that were the iconic accessories during the 2003 SARS outbreak. Nervous Chinese have canceled vacations not only to Mexico, but to the United States.

“I guess customers saw on TV that people in the U.S. are wearing masks which reminds them of SARS,” said Zhang Jun, a travel agent in Xian, China. “They are scared.” Even China’s few Mexican restaurants are empty.

“All of us staff are from Sichuan province. None of us have ever been to Mexico,” said Kong Juan, a 21-year-old waitress at Pete’s Tex-Mex in Beijing. “But the customers are worried about hygiene.”

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barbara.demick@latimes.com

Times staff writers Don Lee in Shanghai and Ken Ellingwood in Mexico City and Nicole Liu and Eliot Gao of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.