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With its bustling streets, shops and busy restaurants, little suggests that ten years ago Amoy Gardens was on the front line of Hong Kong's battle with a virus that caused a global health crisis.

The estate became a beleaguered symbol of the city's struggle to contain an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), named and declared a "worldwide health threat" by the World Health Organization on March 15, 2003.

Hong Kong eventually lost 299 of its citizens to SARS, part of a global death toll of nearly 800. The virus also infected around 1,800 in the city.

As panic spread as fast as the virus seemed to, Hong Kong's usually busy bars and restaurants emptied and its property market took a dive. The daily infection rate climbed globally as carriers travelled between countries.

Amoy Gardens became a ghost town cordoned off by police, with blaring ambulances and a swarm of health officials wearing full-body hazardous material suits, searching for the source of the outbreak.

By the end, 42 people from the estate died and a total of 329 residents had been infected.

Block E accounted for 41 percent of the cases. Authorities sealed it off on March 31 for 10 days and around 250 residents were quarantined in country parks away from densely-populated areas.

"No one would come to Amoy Gardens. Even taxi drivers refused to take people here," Wilson Yip, the chairman of Amoy Gardens owners' joint committee, told AFP.

Yip, who lived in another block, admitted he was "terrified" at the time. Many of his panicked fellow residents attempted to flee given the lack of information about the killer syndrome, but he chose to stay on.

"People who lived there would be discriminated against in Hong Kong. If a hotel found out you came from Amoy Gardens you would be refused a room."

Read more:
Ten years on, the SARS outbreak that changed Hong Kong