HANOI, Vietnam -- Before he became the host suspected of carrying from southern China the deadly illness that continues to nettle health officials around the world, American [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] was an ordinary man concerned with the business of making blue jeans.

On Monday morning, Feb. 24, it was business as usual for Mr. Chen and colleagues from the Shanghai office of [Gilwood Co., Ltd.], a small New York garment firm. He had made the short trip to Vietnam from Hong Kong the day before with a simple mission: make sure Gilwood's local contractor, the Hung Yen Garment Co., or Hugaco, on the outskirts of Hanoi, was properly stitching zippers and other accessories on jeans due for export in April.

Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)], whose business card identified him as Gilwood's garment merchandise manager based in Shanghai, looked happy and healthy that day as he checked samples and had lunch before returning to Hanoi, says Chu Huu Nghi, deputy-director of Hugaco's export-import division. There was no hint that the jovial, 49-year-old Chinese-American would soon take ill with a wicked bug -- which still hasn't been identified -- that would kill him two weeks later and elicit a rare global health warning from the World Health Organization.

So far, Mr. Chen's 10-day Vietnam visit has had a serious impact on the country: Health officials believe his illness spread directly and indirectly to 63 confirmed and suspected cases in Vietnam, most of them health workers and their families. A Vietnamese nurse succumbed to the mystery illness.

The toll in Vietnam now accounts for almost a third of the global count of confirmed and suspected cases that has grown in just a few weeks to more than 200 on four continents. Hong Kong, where the cases have also occurred mostly among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff, now counts 123 cases, the most anywhere.

With the blue-jean manufacturing line appearing in fine working order that first morning on the ground in Vietnam, Mr. Chen and his colleagues returned to Hanoi that afternoon. Local [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] employee Nguyen Bao Thuy says she then took Mr. Chen to do a little shopping. They looked at denim material in the busy Hom market on Hue Street and bought some clothes for Mr. Chen's personal use at a shop called Thang Long on Ngo Quyen Street.

[ Note ... As of Oct 7 2021, the first person who shows for "Nguyen Bao Thuy" is "https://www.linkedin.com/in/bao-thuy-nguyen-38541410/" ... who is a biotechnology patent officer .. example includes https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6794152.html ]

That night, Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954) hit the town to partake of Hanoi's bustling night life. Neighbors later recalled a stranger -- it was Mr. Chen -- who returned to Gilwood's office about 11 p.m.

On this visit to Hanoi, Mr. Chen chose to stay in a bedroom atop Gilwood's [Gilwood Co., Ltd.'s] office, a now-shuttered, four-story, light-blue building with turquoise trim overlooking the city's Ngoc Khanh lake, according to Ms. Thuy. His colleagues from Shanghai, including Kenny Liu and two Chinese nationals, stayed at Hanoi's Daewoo Hotel.

The next morning, Feb. 25, Mr. Chen was feeling a little rough. He had lunch that day with Mr. Liu and their Chinese colleagues at the Daewoo coffee shop overlooking the hotel's pool. After eating, Mr. Chen complained of chills. He went out to buy some medicine and headed back to the office. Ms. Thuy says Mr. Chen told her he thought he just needed an early evening to shake the bug.

He turned in early that night. A concerned colleague arranged for a local doctor to make a house call on Mr. Chen early the next morning, Wednesday, Feb. 26. The doctor recommended rest.

Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] told his colleagues he wasn't feeling strong enough to make another planned trip to Hugaco that morning. Mr. Liu, Ms. Thuy and the others went to the factory without him. When they returned to Gilwood's office later that day, they found Mr. Chen sprawled on his bed with a high fever, clearly in distress.

They hustled him to the capital's lone international hospital, the Hanoi French Hospital. The hospital's staff couldn't identify the pathogen involved but quickly determined they had a serious case on their hands and contacted both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Embassy. After a week of unsuccessful treatment, Mr. Chen was evacuated on March 5 to Hong Kong by private plane at the request of his family. He died eight days later.

At [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] Hong Kong office, a single, bare-walled room where corduroy pants with Nautica labels hang on racks, office head Simon Ho remembers the last time he saw his late colleague. It was on March 7, through a glass window at the Princess Margaret Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. Mr. Chen, whom Mr. Ho had known as sturdy and jocular, lay apparently unconscious with tubes protruding from his body and a respirator doing his breathing.

Mr. Chen's wife, Lisa, who had come from her home in New York, was also there. She occasionally peered through the glass at her husband and sobbed, at times inconsolably, he said. "The doctors said they didn't know what was causing it," Mr. Ho said. The Hong Kong Health Department has declined comment on individual cases of the illness.

Mr. Ho's sadness turned to apprehension as it became clear that Mr. Chen's illness had led to the infection of dozens of health-care workers at the Hanoi hospital where he was treated. Worried he too was at risk, he went to see a doctor. "I saw the TV reports and began to get scared. I've gone in for X-rays," he said. "They didn't turn up anything; I'm healthy."

Mr. Chen's illness hasn't spread to personnel at the Hong Kong hospital where he succumbed; most of the recent Hong Kong cases have been linked to another man who had traveled to southern China before he became ill and who was treated at a different hospital, Hong Kong health officials say.

Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] potentially infectious trail during his last days is a continued source of worry not only to health officials, but also to employees at [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] concerned that they also may have been infected. But, like Mr. Ho, most fellow workers who came into contact with Mr. Chen before he was hospitalized appear to be unaffected by the disease.

Gilwood's Hanoi office is a small operation, employing a Filipino quality-control manager, Roberto Pedragosa; a part-time administrator, Nguyen Duc Ngoc; Ms. Thuy; two security guards; a driver; and a 42-year-old maid, Chu Thi Phuong.

[ Roberto Pedragosa : " https://cn.linkedin.com/in/roberto-pedragosa-31469a30?trk=people-guest_people_search-card " actually worked for Klaus Steilmann GmbH & Co. Kg and not "gilwood" ]

Ms. Phuong, who regularly cleaned the office and also visited Mr. Chen in the hospital, has exhibited some of the same symptoms as Mr. Chen. She is currently in the state-run Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, which is treating several people that the World Health Organization considers to have only unconfirmed cases of the disease it calls severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Ms. Thuy says that Ms. Phuong "feels better now." Ms. Phuong couldn't be reached for comment.

For her part, Ms. Thuy says she came down with a bad headache and cold flashes after Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)]'s visit, but says she now feels better. As a precaution, Vietnamese health officials have instructed her to remain home for an indefinite period. Mr. Ngoc says he is healthy. Mr. Liu, back in Shanghai and not responding to calls or visits seeking comment, hasn't developed any flu-like symptoms common to SARS cases, says [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] President Charles Haigh in a telephone interview from his home in New York City.

The health status of the two Chinese nationals who traveled with Mr. Liu couldn't be immediately learned.

To date, there are no cases at the Hugaco factory of SARS. The Hung Yen provincial department of health visited the factory last week. One official there says there have been no reported cases of SARS in the province's 13 hospitals.

Mr. Pedragosa, 43, Gilwood's quality-control manager in Hanoi, became so worried after Mr. Chen fell ill that he flew home to Manila on March 10 via Ho Chi Minh City (where several cases have since been reported). "I told him not to fly on a plane, but he just wanted to go home he was so scared," said Mr. Haigh.

Mr. Pedragosa, who couldn't be located for comment, was discharged Monday from Manila's Medical City General Hospital, where he had undergone observation and treatment for diarrhea, according to local health officials. He will remain under observation at an undisclosed health facility for another 10 days, they said, but he hasn't developed symptoms of SARS.

Mr. Haigh, who says he and his colleagues are cooperating fully with the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, says Mr. Chen didn't travel to Hanoi from his Shanghai base, but from Hong Kong where he spent "five or six days." He says of the potentially fatal disease, which officials believe has an incubation period of a week or less: "I think Johnny picked it up in Hong Kong."

Whatever the case, Mr. Chen's demise is having a lasting effect on [Gilwood Co., Ltd.], a company Mr. Haigh began 10 years ago to export garments from Asia. The company came to Vietnam less than six months ago, lured like many other companies big and small by a bilateral trade accord with the U.S., which came into effect in December 2001.

"People are walking into our Shanghai office with masks on, like it's the plague," says Mr. Haigh, nursing a bad cold he attributes to lack of sleep and the stress of the past two weeks. "We've lost three weeks of production over the past month over this; this is really hurting my business."

-- Peter Landers in New York contributed to this article.

The death of the 49-year-old Chinese-American has caused a worldwide alarm for the mysterious, life-threatening disease. It is spreading across the globe and has already surfaced with certainty in seven countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition to Chen, the disease is said to have killed five others.

A reconstruction from the Wall Street Journal shows that Chen was an ordinary businessman of our time. His company Gilwood Co., based in New York with an office in Shanghai, China (which officially has more than 300 victims), deals in textiles for the American market. Via Hong Kong (more than 120 victims), Chen left for Hanoi in Vietnam (more than 60 victims) at the end of February for a ten-day visit. There he had to check with the local supplier whether the production of the ordered jeans went as expected. The items, intended for export, had to be sent out in April.

To the envy of India and even China, Vietnam has made a real advance in Asia as a producer of fashion clothing. Thanks in part to the diligence and low wages of the employees. The Japanese like to make a trip to Hanoi to sniff the latest trends and buy a new wardrobe cheaply.

[...]

Although no one then realized the significance, Mr. Chen, 48, had also stayed in the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong. He may have picked up the disease from a 64-year-old Guangdong doctor in town for a wedding, staying in Room 911. Investigators theorize that the doctor infected 12 other guests, several from the same floor, who carried the disease to Singapore, Toronto and elsewhere.

[...]