COVID-19: The xenophobia against Asians

COVID-19: The xenophobia against Asians

In 2002, in the Guangdong Province, in China, an epidemic called SARS spread worldwide but was quickly contained. During that time, it spurred backlash against China, as well as Chinese or people of Asian descent living in other countries as well. This mainly because it originated there, and so it had to mean that China and SARS were closely associated. Now the modern COVID-19 is showing traits of that. As of now, the novel coronavirus has reached 4.9 million cases with a 323,000 casualty rate. It has disrupted sports, businesses, politics, and so many other things. But what was unaccounted for was that the blame shifted to China again since of course it originated in Wuhan, which is a city in China. After spreading internationally, rumors started to come up about the cause and origin of the new virus. Fake videos were released from a “woman eating a bat” which immediately went viral. This caused a stigma about how basically Chinese people ate these bats which caused the virus that has changed the world. 

    

Online sources and news media, as well as social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter displayed memes joking about racist matters. An example would be “bat soup” and strong anti-Asian posts and comments. Granted, evidence has pointed out that COVID-19 most likely was from an animal source, and has close genetic similarity to some animals such as bats and pangolins, but it is still very wrong to accuse a specific ethnic group for that. Now, since the United States is now the country in the entire world to have the most cases about 1.56 million, and 92,333 deaths, blame has started to shift to America while China is recovering slowly. Occasionally now reports from other countries will criticize America’s poor virus response. It just goes to show that blame will always happen no matter what.

                                     People protesting anti-Asian racism