She put the phone down firmly. "What is that child playing at?!"
After working around the clock for three days straight at the peak of the crisis, a colleague dragged Duan Jie into a room to rest. At that moment, she thought about her son who had wanted to talk to her two days before. She picked up the phone and called home. When her sleeping son was awakened by his mother's voice, he was suddenly unable to speak. Instead, he wept bitterly. Motherly love swelled in her chest. Earlier, her words had cut across the headquarters like bullets. For what seemed like forever, she found herself unable to say a single word, echoing her son in her flood of tears. At that moment, her superiors called. An emergency. She had to return to work immediately.
A female patient had just tested positive for SARS, and doctors immediately decided to take her eight-month-old son in for testing too. The child was showing clear signs of SARS. It was suggested the mother be transferred to a designated SARS hospital. HQ staff members were agonizing over whether or not to transfer the eight-month-old to the same SARS hospital. They called Duan Jie in to decide.
"Send a child that small to a SARS hospital? We can't!" she snapped. "We need to rethink this. That should be an absolute last resort!"
"Then what are we supposed to do?" asked her colleagues. Duan Jie thought fast.
"I'll send an ambulance to take the baby to a pediatric hospital. A specialist will head there to assess him. If there's a possibility he hasn't contracted SARS, we can leave him there under observation. If it's clearly SARS, take the child to the designated hospital immediately. Get going at once!"
In the following few hours, Duan Jie rushed around constantly, taking it upon herself to ensure the situation was dealt with. Thanks to the hard work of a team of experts, the child made a full recovery.
After dealing with this young patient, Duan Jie could not help but think of her own son. Her eyes welled with tears.
Suddenly, the phone rang again.
"Hello?" On the other end of the line, there was a clearly worried voice, from a hospital clinic for patients with fever. "We have a suspected SARS case. He's refusing to check in, and he's running through the streets! You'd better come up with something!"
"What!? Where? Which district?"
It was as if HQ had received news of a retreat from the frontline. The atmosphere became tense.
"Near Yonghegong Lama Temple."
"Ok," replied HQ. "We're dispatching men now. Please, help the patient. Don't let him escape!"
The team member put the receiver down, and immediately got on the line with Deputy Secretary Qiang Wei. Qiang, who was in charge of citywide public security for the SARS prevention campaign, immediately sent an order to the Public Security Bureau.
"Dispatch officers to pursue the patient, and return him to the SARS ward ASAP!"
A few hours later, the streets surrounding Yonghe Temple were the stage for a hair-raising scene. The patient was a migrant worker in his 70s. His accent, though hard to place, marked him as a non-Beijinger. When four police officers surrounded the attempted fugitive, clad head-to-toe in white protective gear, he didn't try to run.
"I don't have the money for a doctor," he wailed, over and over again.
"Sir, the treatment won't cost you a penny. You don't need to worry. Just come with us."
"I don't believe it. Why in the world would they help you without taking money?"
He wouldn't believe them, and he wouldn't go to the hospital. The police had no choice. Guiding him toward the hospital step by step, they tried to reason with him.
The whole scene played out over a 100-meter stretch of road—that was the distance from where he was apprehended to the nearest hospital. It took three hours.
On May 31st, a spokesman from the Beijing anti-SARS campaign declared that the city was making important steps in the struggle to rid itself of the epidemic. He gave a statistic: in the first week of May, 666 new cases were diagnosed. In the last week of May, 65 new cases were diagnosed—a fall of 90%. The treatment rate had risen by 500% between the first and last week of the month.
The situation in Beijing was tied to the situation nationwide. The next day, the State Council held a press conference. Since the epidemic began, Gao Qiang, the secretary of the Ministry of Health, had maintained a grave look. But that day, as he talked to the journalists, he was smiling for the first time in quite awhile.
"The whole nation has struggled for so long against the SARS epidemic," he said. "Now, it is finally under control."
That day, as I left the offices of the anti-SARS campaign, I looked upon Chang'an Avenue. The avenue, which had been cold and lifeless for so long, was now filled with busy traffic again. It was filled on both sides with the hubbub of bustling crowds and with sweet midsummer flowers. My heart was filled with the sorrow of the memories of the recent past. In those weeks, Beijing, you had borne the weight of so many tears, of so much suffering. You were the stage to a scene that made our hearts pound, a scene that left us trembling.
