Traveling alongside that fear is xenophobia and discrimination against people of Chinese origin or people who simply appear to be from China. The public school board in York Region, north of Toronto, issued a statement effectively rebuking more than 9,000 people who signed a petition demanding that the children in a family recently returned from China be kept from their classes.

[Read: As Coronavirus Spreads, So Does Anti-Chinese Sentiment]

As I write this, four cases of coronavirus have been reported in Canada and the anti-Chinese sentiment appears limited. The health care system is working smoothly, and officials have been open about what they’re doing and what’s going on. That’s a marked contrast to SARS, where chaos and mistakes, all cloaked in secrecy, dominated.

The extent of the turmoil in 2003 had dimmed in my memory until I recently read the report from an inquiry Ontario did after the outbreak.

“Our public health and emergency infrastructures were in a sorry state of decay, starved for resources by governments of all three political parties,” Justice Archie Campbell wrote in his final report released in 2006. “The only thing that saved us from a worse disaster was the courage and sacrifice and personal initiative of those who stepped up — the nurses, the doctors, the paramedics and all the others — sometimes at great personal risk, to get us through a crisis that never should have happened.”