48 Hours

Hong Kong: Crowded City of Fear (16x31)

: 09, 2003

At first glance, Hong Kong seems as noisy and bustling as ever. But there is one conspicuous difference -- the face masks. They are everywhere. And they are the first hint of what the SARS outbreak has done to this famous city. Correspondent Barry Petersen reports. “It’s changed the way we go about our day-to-day lives,” says Whitney Small, a public relations executive originally from Brunswick, Maine. "It’s not so much that you fear you’re going to be the next victim, it’s more that it’s creating a disturbance in what was already a very tense time in Hong Kong.” Hong Kong is a crowded city of fear, in a region that is now Ground Zero for a worldwide SARS outbreak.