Hysteria grips a forbidden city at the epicentre of a killer virus

This is a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Hysteria over Sars has engulfed Beijing as some people began trying to escape the Chinese capital while others frantically stocked up on basic groceries fearing that the authorities will quarantine the whole city.

Many queued at railway stations and airports fighting to leave before the government banned all travel in or out of a city where the death toll has kept rising.

"Migrant workers and students are forbidden to leave and outsiders are already being stopped from entering the city," explained Zhao Wenren, a taxi driver. "Now you can still leave but later people say you won't be allowed back in."

People could be seen around the city emptying supermarket shelves and carting as much home as possible before the start of a three-day holiday on 1 May. Some feared that soon peasants will be excluded from delivering supplies of fresh vegetables, meat and fish, others said it was because they had heard all shops would be closed and sanitised.

Around the city police are operating road blocks to stop outsiders coming. There are rumours the government may halt domestic flights and introduce tight controls on incoming foreign passengers.

In Xian, a 39-year-old New Zealand tourist was stopped and sent to hospital after he was detected boarding with a high fever on Monday evening. Beijing's international airport has installed three heat sensors to try and identify sick passengers.

Squads of sanitation workers in masks and rubber gloves were visible spraying disinfectant across the capital as the new mayor, Wang Qishan, placed the city on an emergency footing after his predecessor, Wang Xuenong, was fired on Sunday.

Mr Wang ordered 1,000 hospital beds to be prepared and is buying 1,000 artificial respirators, 30 more ambulances and 500,000 protective medical suits for confirmed Sars patients, an indication that medical authorities are preparing for the worst.

Most people have stopped coming to work, claiming sickness or the need to look after their children who have been discharged from school on Thursday for a two-week holiday.

The normally crowded four-storey Ikea store was almost entirely empty of customers and the city's luxury hotels are staffed. At the Shangri-la the Filipino band are still crooning Elvis but there is nobody there to listen.

It feels just like the aftermath of 4 June 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Everyone in the centre is now wearing surgical masks, and shop assistants complain if you aren't wearing one. Even the once overcrowded buses have few passengers. Instead sales of bicycles have risen.

Beijing, with its nine million people, has overtaken Hong Kong as the Sars hot zone. Until last week, officials had admitted to only 37 infections in the city, now there are 39 known deaths and more than 700 known cases. Most of the foreign community is evacuating after foreign schools announced they were closing until 8 May. There are 135 reported Sars cases in 84 different Beijing schools, including 69 university students and 30 staff.

It is still widely believed that a true picture has not emerged in China. Staff at one of the capital's larger hospitals, the People's Hospital of Beijing University, believe that officials have continued to understate numbers, particularly among medical workers. According to official data 541 medical workers are infected in China.

The 1,200-bed hospital was closed with staff saying that at least 60 doctors and nurses have caught the Sars virus after they worked in a makeshift "isolation" ward. Without proper facilities to accommodate the growing numbers of suspected patients, suspected and confirmed cases have been mingled together with some infecting one other.

In other hospitals suspected Sars cases are being monitored in the same ward as Aids patients. Patients suffering from other ailments have sought to discharge themselves from hospitals and at People's hospital police were deployed to stop people leaving.

As the capital increasingly feels like a city under siege, the government has announced it is setting up a national task force to combat Sars and has established a national fund of 2bn yuan (£151m) for the prevention and control of the disease.

Officials have called on medical workers and others to show "greater understanding and compassion" for Sars patients, whom the media describes as feeling "isolated and depressed" and prone to lose their tempers with medical workers.

Morale is a major problem and the government has given the job of leading the campaign to China's "Iron Lady", Wu Yi, the only woman in the 25-member Politburo. She will oversee an emergency programme to set up a China Centre of Disease Control and Prevention to co-ordinate reporting from around the country.

Some of the hardest hit provinces outside Beijing, such as Shanxi, are very short of proper equipment such as ambulances to move patients and artificial respirators and the Communist Party secretary appears to have been given emergency powers to fight the mystery virus. World Health Organisation experts have extended their investigations in Shanghai to five days. In the country's largest city, a key transportation hub, there are merely two confirmed cases and 16 suspected patients, including one US citizen and another from Taiwan.

The city's doctors appear to be ruling out Sars suspects if the person showing symptoms has not travelled to a declared "affected area" or had been in contact with an infected person confirmed as having Sars.

Some local governments such as that in Inner Mongolia have ordered that under no circumstances must any patient be turned away, even if they cannot afford the hospital medical fees. The Inner Mongolia Medical College now has 42 confirmed or suspected cases of Sars, but reports said hospitals had been turning away anyone could not pay a hefty deposit for a long hospital stay.

In the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, teachers at all schools and kindergartens have started taking the temperatures of all the children twice a day. School playgrounds and the like are being closed to all but local residents. In Guangdong province the government has had to step in and patrol shops to regulate prices for medical products such as masks, vinegar and garlic.

In other parts of China, special regulations on the handling and destruction of the materials used to treat Sars patients as well as sewage and waste water are being issued to prevent them leaving the hospital and causing secondary infections.