EVEN as the first reports trickled in of a mysterious, flu-like disease killing people in China, alarm bells started ringing. Was SARS the start of the “big one” – the flu pandemic that is expected to surface sometime soon in Asia, a rival for the 1918 outbreak that killed at least 20 million people?
In the end, there was no global catastrophe. Caused by a coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome affected a reported 8098 people, killing 774 of them. But though that hardly compares to the hundreds of thousands of deaths flu causes each year, the social effects of the SARS…
