Deng Xiaohong, the vice-director of the Beijing Health Bureau, said the emergency blueprint is also designed to deal with other possible emergencies like mass poisonings.

The plan, expected to be completed in the third quarter of the year, will include the establishment of an emergency headquarters, a citywide information system and a public health prevention system.

Deng said it is not known whether SARS is a seasonal disease as it is not fully understood at this stage.

She said the health authority will be very cautious and spare no effort to strengthen preventative work against the virus.

She also predicted that the travel advisory imposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) against Beijing could be lifted in about a week as the city is moving forward rapidly to meet the requirements for the removal of the ban.

"There are 134 SARS patients in the hospital now, all of them have stayed there for more than 20 days. Except for seven cases, which are critical, most of them have moved in to the recovery period,'' Deng said.

According to Deng, many of the patients are expected to be out of hospital in a week, meeting requirements for the removal of the ban -- fewer than 60 hospitalized SARS patients.

Robert Bietz, the spokesman for the WHO's China office, said the command to remove the travel advisory should be released by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director-general of WHO. Bietz said he has not got any sign from Geneva yet that the ban will be lifted.

There were no new or suspected SARS cases reported on the Chinese mainland on Friday and Beijing has not reported a single case of the disease for nine consecutive days, as of Friday.

If Beijing wants to get off the WHO's list, it has to have no reports of the virus for 20 consecutive days, Deng said.

The last 18 recovered SARS patients in Beijing's Xiaotangshan Hospital were discharged on Friday.

As the country's largest SARS designated facility, the hospital was home to 680 patients during the 51 day-period beginning on April 30, when the virus was peaking.

Eight of the patients died, resulting in a mortality rate of less than 1.2 percent. There has been no report of infection among the hospital's 1,318 medical staff.

When talking about the misdiagnosis of cases, Deng admitted that there was a possibility that number of patients had been over-estimated, which can be attributed to the lack of a rapid diagnosis system at the early stage of SARS.

(China Daily June 21, 2003)