Word: taiyuan
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...child policy. And to top it off, they're woefully paid: salaries average $100-$150 per month, according to a police-run website, newpolice.net. Police departments routinely collect fines from people detained for wrongdoing, and not just to line pockets but also to meet payroll, says Wang Taiyuan, a police officer and professor at the Public Security University in Beijing, China's West Point for cops. Morale is suffering. On newpolice.net, one disgruntled cop laments: "Police work harder than donkeys, eat worse than pigs, rise earlier than roosters, work later than whores, earn less than farmers...
Some provincial health workers are equally unlikely to be candid. At a secret staff meeting overheard by a TIME reporter, Dr. Zhang Hanwei, director of the Shanxi Provincial People's Hospital in Taiyuan, relayed what he called the "three nos" disseminated by China's Ministry of Central Publicity: no talking to the media about SARS, no talking to the public about treating the disease and no tattling to WHO if its experts come calling. And with that warning, the meeting ended. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the epidemic. --By Hannah Beech. With reporting by Susan Jakes and Huang...
...reality is that SARS patients are overflowing from Taiyuan's threadbare hospitals. With nearly 40 confirmed cases filling up one quarantine ward at the Shanxi Medical University No. 1 Hospital, another makeshift isolation section had been set up in the back of the hospital. Many of this ward's rooms have as many as five suspected SARS patients squeezed into them, their coughs wafting freely through screens into the corridor. Family members can intermingle with patients, and some relatives are not even wearing masks...
...packed are some Taiyuan hospitals that they have been turning away patients. One relative of a SARS victim at the Shanxi Medical University No. 1 Hospital was shocked to hear nurses, citing overcrowded conditions, refusing to admit more SARS patients. "It is really bad that the government doesn't care about ordinary people's lives," he says. Other patients are avoiding hospitals completely, because they don't have the funds to pay for expensive SARS treatment, thereby raising the chances that the disease will continue spreading into China's interior...
...Thankfully, most city residents seem cognizant of basic SARS symptoms, because of an extensive?if belated?publicity campaign. Elementary and middle schools have been closed in Taiyuan, while taxis in both Taiyuan and Hohhot have been disinfected, as have many trains and buses. But information quickly runs dry in the grasslands village of Badian, just a 40-minute drive from Hohhot. There, Mrs. Guo says she's heard of SARS but is mistakenly convinced there aren't any cases in Hohhot...