article: People duck in and out of noodle joints, fast food chains and convenience stores before heading home to the warren of apartments nestled in the estate's nineteen tower blocks. But 10 years ago, this densely populated Hong Kong apartment complex, home to 19,000 people, was an eerie ghost town. Two hundred residents had contracted a deadly respiratory disease, now known as Sars, within a week and no-one knew how it was spreading. Rats and cockroaches were touted by the press as possible culprits. "Taxi drivers refused to come here," Yip Hing Kwok, a long-time resident and now a local councillor, recalls of the deadly 2003 outbreak. Alarm turned to panic on March 31 when residents of block E, which experienced the densest concentration of cases, woke up to find that they were unable to leave their building as police and medical staff clad in protective suits enforced an emergency quarantine order. Police were ordered to chase down those who had already left and residents were later moved to two holiday camps. "We tried to improve the cleaning of the estate but the number of cases kept increasing," says Mr Yip, who did not live in the blighted block. "The situation was uncontrollable." Amoy Gardens played an unwanted starring role in the 2003 Sars epidemic that infected 8,096 worldwide, and killed 744. The disease, from the same family of viruses as the common cold, emerged in southern China at the end of 2002. It was carried to Hong Kong by a doctor, whose one-night stay in the Metropole Hotel resulted in seven other guests being infected. These guests then jumped on planes, spreading Sars around the world. While the disease appeared to spread fast, the number of people killed by the virus was relatively small, especially compared with the half a million people who died of influenza in the same year. But these facts were not known until the disease had come under control in the summer. In March and early April of 2003, as the epidemic seemed to spiral out of control, Hong Kong was a city gripped by fear. Surgical masks became hot commodities and the city's usually crowded shopping malls, restaurants and mass transport emptied. Expats fled, schools closed and those who could worked from home. Back then, working as a reporter in the city, I recall being urged by a contact to head straight for the airport as Hong Kong was to be declared an infectious port and sealed from the outside world. A teenager was later arrested in what turned out to be an April Fool's Day stunt. On the same day, a hugely popular singer and actor, Leslie Cheung, committed suicide by jumping from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the middle of the financial district, plunging an already anxious Hong Kong into mourning. Sars stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and was the name given to the respiratory disease by the WHO on March 15, 2003. Like the common cold, it belongs to the coronavirus family. Scientists think the disease jumped from civet
summary: Bathed in low evening light, Amoy Gardens is a hive of activity.