At least Sars can't touch your street cred. Designer masks now march through the streets of Hong Kong. The surgical look is out - Fred Perry and Hello Kitty are in.

I wonder whether the type of mask you wear says something about the type of person you are. On the underground yesterday - the favorite hang out for mask wearers - the man opposite me had drawn a wide inane grin on his mask, he was beaming from ear to ear. A simple gesture, momentarily lifting the glum mood that Hong Kong is in. After all behind a mask nobody can see you smile.

Not everybody has joined the mask brigade. The majority of ex-patriots are holding out, their naked faces a statement of smug indifference. Staging mock coughing fits is the current clever joke about town.

A sense of invincibility also pervades amongst the international student population. So far nobody under 30 has died, reports that a healthy diet can help your recovery rate serves to convince the remaining few that we can't be touched. However, gossip that university will be cancelled if one person contracts the virus means that we're all on the look out for sneezers and coughers. Last week I was met with cheers from the international students as I crawled about with muscular aches and pains. For a moment there we thought exams would be cancelled. Fortunately for the university and me it was just a common cold. I never thought I'd be so happy to take exams.

At Baptist University, where I am studying, 40 international students out of an original 60 have gone home. The Canadians got pulled back weeks ago by their government and most of the American universities screamed legalities down the phones to their students until they too had to pack their bags. Fortunately for the Brits all we get is the odd e-mail from the study abroad office reminding us to eat our greens and 'use clean handkerchiefs'.

Its not that we don't take the virus seriously, its just that, having been exposed to the situation for a couple of months now while the world watched Iraq, Hong Kong's panic has come and gone and a sense of defiant acceptance has kicked in. Unlike the rest of the world, people's paranoia here has begun to wane. In the UK it seems media has now seized Sars as its new drama. Luckily for me this means more anxious telephone calls from home.

Perhaps the international students are blasé about it because we have the advantage of being able to leave if we do decide to. Local students don't have this option and so are undoubtedly more cautious as they obediently wear their masks in lesson time. But even though local attitudes may be more serious they are still not panic stricken. Pragmatism is the rule. As I was told by my Mandarin teacher, "How am I supposed to earn the money I need to support my family if I don't go to work? Not going to work is defeatist. We just have to be very careful".

I have been careful, I cancelled my trip to Beijing because of the Sars. It took weeks of deliberating over but at last my decision not to go was based more out of fear of the plane being infected than catching anything in Beijing. But then on the day I was meant to depart, Beijing at last revealed some of its appalling cover-ups. The scale of the problem had more than doubled.

There is a lot of anger towards the Beijing government's secrecy over Sars. The Hong Kong authorities have not been incredibly forthcoming with information either, until recently we didn't know who was dying, where they lived and what treatment people were receiving. Confusing statistics meant a lot of us were, and still are, in limbo about what to think.

But if there is an overarching mood in Hong Kong it is one of cynicism against the government's handling of the crisis and of defiance. A campaign in the local paper calls upon the public to "Help protect our frontline workers" by sponsoring protective suits. Another campaign, Operation Unite, pledges further solidarity and support for medical and care workers.

That makes it sound like we are fighting a war of our own; many people here believe that we are.