It’s Gone Viral

I’d like to say that we saw it coming, but the truth is that the TIME staff in Hong Kong — where I was working as a reporter in the spring of 2003 — were as caught off guard as everyone else. We heard reports about unusual illnesses in the mainland Chinese cities across the border and market runs on vinegar, which the Cantonese believe can ward off respiratory disease when boiled. We even sent a reporter to hospitals in neighboring Guangzhou, where the sick were piling up. But it wasn’t until doctors and nurses started to fall ill in Hong Kong’s Prince of Wales Hospital — until our friends, neighbors and even co-workers hid their faces behind surgical masks, with only worried eyes visible — that we began to understand what SARS was, and what it could mean for the rest of the world.

For a brief, terrifying period — until more was discovered about the virus — we thought that it could mean a death sentence for untold numbers of people. Hong Kong took on a fearful air, full of foreboding — like the London that’s described in the opening pages of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Property prices plunged in apocalyptic proportions. As tourism dried up, grand hotels were left empty, their rooms unlit and their restaurants vacant. The wealthy began to nervously decamp to holiday homes in the Thai islands. And in a city that thrived on socializing and schmooze, handshakes and even air-kissing were shunned overnight.

(MORE: How to Prepare for a Pandemic)

We weren’t alone in our ignorance of SARS. Who could have guessed that a new virus would emerge from bats and civet cats — wild animals sold as food in southern China’s zoolike street markets — to infect human beings? Or that a single sick doctor would travel to Hong Kong in late February and somehow manage to infect dozens of other people staying on his hotel floor — and that they would go on to spread the disease around the world? Or that a submicroscopic packet of viral genes would go on to kill nearly 800 people and bring cities like Hong Kong and Beijing to a virtual standstill? Who could have realized that we were all so connected?

But those are the lessons of SARS, which burst onto the global scene just a decade ago. And we were fortunate that the price we paid to learn those lessons wasn’t as painful as it might have been. Though thousands were sickened by the disease, once doctors learned to isolate infected patients, they were able to largely halt the spread in a matter of weeks. The international scientific network coordinated by the World Health Organization did stellar work: the coronavirus that caused SARS was discovered by researchers in Hong Kong, broken down by U.S. scientists in Atlanta and ultimately decoded at 4 a.m. by computers in Vancouver. The groundbreaking medical response to SARS underscored the value of interconnection and cross-border cooperation. The white coats — from the scientists in the lab to the doctors and nurses who lost their lives treating the disease — were heroes.

(MORE: Breaking the SARS Code)

But SARS also showed the dark side of our increasingly interconnected globe. Thanks to air travel and international trade, a virus that emerges in a small city in China can spread around the world in no time at all. More to the point, that means that the medical mistakes of one country can matter to every other. During SARS, the most glaring failures were committed by China, which kept the international community in the dark for months about the full extent of SARS, giving the disease time to spread. It wasn’t until the brave Chinese doctor Jiang Yan-yong told then TIME reporter Susan Jakes that scores of people in Beijing were sick with SARS that the Chinese government began to open up on the disease. By then, though, the damage was done — not just in China, but around the world.

(PHOTOS: Hong Kong, 1997-2007)

Ten years on, the international health system tempered by SARS has been tested repeatedly — by the occasional skirmish with the H5N1 avian-flu virus and by the influenza pandemic that struck in 2009. So far the system has stood strong, but there’s no guarantee that won’t change in the future. Right now scientists are struggling with a new SARS-like coronavirus that has emerged in the Middle East, killing seven people so far. Early reports suggest the virus can infect human airways even faster than SARS did, though researchers still don’t know how easily it can spread. SARS emptied cities, shut down airports and caused more than $50 billion in damages — despite the fact that it ultimately proved easy to slow. That was our biggest piece of luck. But when it comes to the lottery of emerging diseases, luck won’t always be with us.

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