The media is flooded with heroic stories of those who are fighting Sars. It also quotes experts on why reputedly impenetrable protective measures failed to prevent health-care workers being infected.
The focus of some of the experts' views has been elderly Sars patients with atypical, non-specific symptoms - absence of fever and respiratory symptoms. Worse, the elderly were confused, incommunicable and unco-operative, resulting in them becoming unidentifiable, 'difficult' infectors, who spread the disease to poorly alerted health-care workers in an 'unexpected' care setting.
However, professional health-care workers know that old, frail patients look quite different to younger patients when they are ill, and they require extra skill and attention.
It is true that ageing and chronic illness make old people susceptible to new illnesses and they more readily succumb. Thus they were vulnerable to the outbreaks of Sars in hospitals. Because they are in frequent need of hospital care, they easily become the victims of cross-infection in the event that infection control breaks down.
The high-profile manner of making this public, without explaining old patients' vulnerability and needs, tends to be misleading. The lay public is tempted to incriminate these innocent vectors as the likely cause of a high infection rate among health-care workers. Worst of all, elderly patients might be denied proper care as a result.
The Sars death toll is rising, and it is always stated with an additional remark about the proportion of fatal cases with underlying chronic disease. Yet it takes no more than general wisdom to understand that pre-existing chronic illnesses predispose patients of serious acute disease to more complications and higher mortality.
Are we inviting the thought that if many Sars deaths are due to such patients, then the death rate is more 'justifiable'? The death rate is just a figure. Clarification of its causes is more important, and most crucial is the analysis for an avoidable or preventable cause of death.