The writer is a Harvard University professor and co-author of ‘Healthy Buildings’
The 2003 Sars epidemic exploded when an infected healthcare worker, suffering from minor respiratory symptoms, went to Hong Kong for a friend’s wedding and checked into a ninth-floor room in the Metropole Hotel. He fell severely ill the next day, went to a hospital and died shortly thereafter — but not before transmitting Sars to 16 other guests with rooms on the same floor. These inadvertent hosts carried Sars to Canada, Vietnam, Singapore and across China.
Investigators from the World Health Organization summed it up best: “A global outbreak was thus seeded from a single person on a single day on a single floor of a Hong Kong hotel.”
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