Beijing hospital closed, 4,000 quarantined

Struggling to contain Sars, Beijing officials sealed off a third hospital today, closed college dormitories and ordered 4,000 people who might have been exposed to the killer virus to stay at home under quarantine.

The closure of the Ditan Hospital in northern Beijing came less than two weeks after foreign reporters were invited to tour the facility, touted by the government as a showcase of its preparedness for severe acute respiratory syndrome.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many patients and staff were in the hospital, which has 500 beds, 643 staff and specialises in infectious diseases.

A hospital official said the measure is meant to prevent the spread of the Sars virus among visitors and non-Sars patients.

A Ditan doctor said it was her duty to stay.

“At this critical time if we don’t go to the front line, who else will?” she asked.

Dormitories at the Northern Jiaotong University and the Central University of Finance and Economics have also been closed, affecting 600 students.

Seventeen cases and one death linked to Sars have been reported at Central University, while Northern Jiaotong has had 14 cases. All have been admitted to hospital., school officials said.

Chinese authorities announced other measures to combat the disease, as five more people died of Sars, bringing the country’s death toll to 115 – 42 of them in Beijing. The country has reported 2,601 cases of infection, with more than 870 in Beijing.

Vice Premier Wu Yi said China will spend £265m (€381.5m) to set up a nationwide health network to fight Sars and other public health emergencies.

Another £150m (€216m) will be set aside to pay for emergency medical services for people with Sars who can’t afford care, Wu said in a report to the national legislature.

Meanwhile, the deputy director general of the Beijing Health Bureau said 4,000 people who had “intimate contact” with others showing Sars symptoms have been ordered to stay at home under quarantine.

The announcement came two days after Beijing said it was invoking emergency powers to quarantine people exposed to the virus that causes Sars.

Guo said the city government, which has designated six hospitals to handle Sars cases, might add more, but gave no details.

Officials also sought to calm fears about the illness.

A city government spokesman denied rumours that authorities planned to declare martial law in Beijing or close the city’s airports and highways.

Cai Fuchao, head of the city’s propaganda department, said inspection teams were being sent to 147 city hospitals to ensure that they were following guidelines on handling Sars cases.

Cai said the city government was co-ordinating with China’s military to ensure that all cases were reported. Military hospitals had earlier failed to report Sars patients to civilian authorities, leading to complaints that China was not fully disclosing information on the outbreak.

Defying anxiety about Sars, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin became the first major foreign leader to visit Beijing during the outbreak, saying he wanted to ”show solidarity” as China fights the disease.

The arrival of Raffarin, the French prime minister, was a boost for the Chinese government that has seen visits by other foreign leaders called off due to Sars. Beijing’s Communist Party secretary, Liu Qi, thanked him for coming despite the outbreak, saying, “I truly appreciate this spirit.”

“I am convinced that at the top of the Chinese state there is a will to use every possible means to fight the virus,” Raffarin said.

In recent days, officials have discouraged people from travelling for fear they might spread Sars to uninfected areas of this massive country. However, many people in Beijing – mostly migrant workers and students – have ignored the warnings and fled the capital.

In the southern city of Wuxi, officials were blocking buses from Beijing from entering the city, about a two-hour drive west of Shanghai.

In Shanghai – China’s biggest metropolis with 17 million people – a Highway Administration official said special Sars inspection teams were checking vehicles at every highway toll gate near the city’s border.

“Particularly vehicles from affected areas will be seriously checked,” said the official, who refused to give her name.

Ditan is the second hospital to be quarantined this week. On Thursday, officials sealed off the People’s Hospital of Peking University and on April 9, officials shut down the People’s Armed Police General Hospital after staff members fell ill with Sars.