SAN FRANCISCO (CNN/Money) -
I had lunch Monday with Allen Choate, the Hong Kong-based director of China program development for the Asia Foundation, a non-profit headquartered in San Francisco and with offices throughout Asia.
Choate had flown in from Hong Kong, where he's become an amateur expert on SARS in part because his wife, a real expert, is a nurse who recently quit working in one of the city's public hospitals.
The first thing I did after lunch was wash my hands. (Wouldn't you?) But seriously, I came away from the meal with the dapper and erudite Choate with a sanguine thought: The SARS crisis, while undeniably tragic and economically devastating, won't continue to be a commercial catastrophe for much longer.
Like the winter storms that hurt Northeastern retailers, it'll survive as an excuse for poor performance, especially for tech firms doing business in Asia. But thankfully, SARS will recede sooner rather than later as a negative factor on the world economy and its stock markets.
The good news
Why the optimism? As Choate points out, the crisis already appears to be under control from a public-health perspective.
More, the panic is greatest in the areas least affected, especially the urbane Petri dish of intrigue that is the Chinese capital, Beijing.
Conversely -- and none of this should minimize the tragedy that is SARS -- it hasn't been nearly as bad as one might expect.
Guangzhou, Choate argues, was "a disease waiting to happen." And yet the industrial city where the SARS virus began has experienced relatively few deaths, considering the pitiful living conditions of its inhabitants.
Add to the mix that the virus has been contained in Vietnam and appears to be under control in Singapore, and you have the making of crisis winding down.
"This will be a non-issue in Hong Kong in another six to eight weeks," Choate predicts.
Still some impact
In the meantime, of course, the commercial impact is huge. A recent Guangzhou trade fair did 2 percent of the previous year's business.
The Shanghai auto show was cancelled halfway into its run. Managers of Taiwan-owned factories on the mainland either can't get to their plants or can't return home from them.
If China's economy slows overall, as many economists believe it will this year, the hit to employment will be massive.
Interestingly, perhaps the biggest impact of the crisis -- outside the human toll -- is on China's politics. Little noticed is the background of the woman named China's new minister of health.
| Recently by Adam Lashinsky
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She is Wu Yi, a senior politician who worked for decades in China's oil industry and who has no background in public health. So why was she put in the hot seat? Because, according to Choate, Wu's last job was directing China's trade negotiations with the United States over joining the World Trade Organization.
In other words, she's trusted by the Western business community, and the whole reason China kept mum about SARS in the first place was for fear of spooking foreign investors.
Wu calms the business community by suggesting someone they trust is on the case.
Maybe this time someone actually is.
Barrett's barrage
Monday's column harshed on Intel CEO Craig Barrett for suggesting that we should give up trying to value options simply because the exercise is so difficult.
One wonders if Intel's board had some sense of the value of the options package it awarded Barrett as he was taking pen to paper. The CEO disclosed his new cache -- 350,000 options with an exercise price of $18.63 -- one day before his diatribe appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Nice timing, Craig.
Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.
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