I sense that the media is beginning to realise what it has done and is starting to see sense. At a lunch today at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in HK I spoke to a number of the journalists and they seem to be agreed on this. At the lunch, Vivian Wong, Director at the Hospital Authority also presented figures which showed that the number of deaths in HK from Atypical Pneumonias in the first four months of this year increased by less than 5% from the corresponding figure last year (and cases labelled as SARS constituted about 12% of the total Atypical Pneumonia deaths in that period). In other words, what we have is a re-classification of a proportion of cases, but no significant increase in the overall chances of dying of pneumonia in Hong Kong.
Some more data and analysis at my website:
http://home.so-net.com.hk/~pns/