Originally Posted by
slats11
China was the only country in the world with meaningful numbers (over 100 cases) to report mortality less than 10% - everyone else was 2-3 x higher.
Yes, but in the case of Hong Kong the mortality rate due to SARS (as opposed to with SARS - big difference) was much lower than the headline 300 figure normally reported.
Essentially, there was a panic overreaction by the HK medical establishment that meant patients were given huge doses of steroids. The HK "experts" are, of course, not proud of this, so it doesn't get talked about now. But it did slip out at the time and was reported in the South China Morning Post on 9 May 2003.
Professor Yuen Kwok-Yung, one of HK's "experts", said that SARS wasn't generally what killed otherwise healthy people then - it was due to the large doses of steroids, thereby turning their immune system off and causing them to die from whichever bug next passed by and which their body no long had a defence against. Many more people survived this "treatment" but were maimed for life. The HK Government has spent several hundred million HK$ in compensation and ongoing support to those unfortunates.
Contemporaneous screenshot of the article on the SCMP's website here:
https://ibb.co/LhFDCwW
Details of the HK Government cock-up compensation fund here:
https://www.swd.gov.hk/en/index/site...ub_trustfundf/