Racism hinders the fight against COVID-19

I am a citizen of Wuhan. Like millions of other Wuhan residents who now live in a state of fear and anxiety, the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is to check the latest news of the coronavirus epidemic.

In December 2019, a month before the Spring Festival holiday, an unknown coronavirus broke out and rapidly spread in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, China. This virus is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans.  Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002. Compared to the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, the novel coronavirus has a lower mortality rate but seems to be spreading much faster. It took almost four months for SARS to spread to 1,000 people, but the novel coronavirus infected more than 1,200 people in just 25 days. On January 19, 2020, the first exported case of this virus was discovered in Guangdong Province, hundreds of miles from Wuhan. Just three days later, on January 22, 23 provinces across the country had confirmed cases. So far, around 80,000 people from 29 countries have been infected with the virus and more than 2,000 have died.

Facing the complicated and severe epidemic situation, China has taken drastic measures to limit the spread of the virus. On January 23, Wuhan – a city of 14 million inhabitants and about 5 million migrants – was put in lockdown. All transport – airplanes, subways, buses, and trains – have been suspended. Private cars are no longer permitted to be driven on the streets without a special permit. All citizens are required to stay at home to avoid cross infection. A virus has silenced a bustling city. A few days later, 13 cities in Hubei Province with a total population of 56 million people were locked down. 31 provincial-level regions in China all activated top-level emergency responses to the coronavirus. These measures are without precedent, not only in China but perhaps in the whole history of humankind.

On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. And on February 11, the WHO announced an official name for the disease, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (abbreviated “COVID-19”).

If I did not live in the epicenter of the disease, I probably would not give much thought to the naming of a new disease. As it is, I am forced to reflect how much harm the inappropriate naming of infectious diseases can do to certain groups.

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of several new human infectious diseases. These diseases are often given common names outside the scientific community for everyday communication. Inappropriate disease names, once established, are difficult to change and can bring serious negative impacts and harms to individuals and communities. Therefore, it is important that an appropriate name is assigned to a newly identified human disease by whoever first reports it.

In response to such concerns, WHO developed a set of standard best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases in 2015. In this guideline, the WHO advises against using place names, human names, or animal names for naming new infectious diseases with the aim of “minimising unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”

According to these guidelines, disease names such as Ebola, Zika, swine flu, Rift Valley fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or monkeypox are all problematic. The use of place name for a disease should be avoided as they can stigmatise entire regions or ethnic groups. For example, the Ebola River of Congo or the Zika Forest of Uganda, where the Ebola and Zika diseases were first identified, are now inevitably linked to these diseases in the public imagination.

The use of animal species in names such as “swine flu” (officially known as “H1N1”) has had unintentional negative economic and social impacts by stigmatising the pork industry, even though this disease is being spread by people rather than pigs. (See related post on the “Danish boar fence”)

People’s names, usually the scientists who identified the disease, may also be inappropriate as are “terms that incite undue fear” such as “unknown” or “fatal.” “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals,” the WHO says in its guidelines.

Before the announcement of the official name, COVID19, by the WHO, “Wuhan virus” or “China virus” were widely used (and continue to be used) for the disease by some foreign media.

At a time when China is mobilising all resources to fight COVID-19, fear and discrimination spread rapidly outside China through these stigmatized names. Jyllands Posten, a Danish broadsheet paper, for example, published a cartoon of the Chinese national flag where the five stars were replaced with virus-like figures. In response to China’s protest, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded that “we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.”

An increase in racial stereotyping of Chinese in particular and Asians in general over the novel coronavirus can be seen in the media of other Western countries, too. The French newspaper Le Courrier Picard used inflammatory headlines including “Alerte jaune” (Yellow alert) and “Le peril jaune?” (Yellow peril?), stigmatising all Asian people as virus. Der Spiegel, a German magazine, featured a man wearing a red hoody, protective masks, goggles and earphones, with a giant headline “Coronavirus – Made in China.” And the US Wall Street Journal published an article with racist overtones under the headline, “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” humiliating China’s subordination to Western countries in the 19^th Century and marking down the prospect of the Chinese economy.

These biased media reports not only constitute racial stereotyping but undoubtedly contribute to racial discrimination experienced by Chinese and Asians in these countries.

This anti-Chinese racism has now gone well beyond the media. As of February 20, Amazon allows individual businesses to openly sell T-shirts, hoodies, cups and other products imprinted with the insulting slogan “coronavirus made in China” on its English mall.

Even more outrageously Chinese students and migrants have been racially vilified and attacked because of their nationality and race. On January 30, for instance, a Chinese postgraduate student was attacked by three local people in Sheffield, UK, for wearing a mask to protect herself and others from COVID-19. In the US, racist attacks against Asians are said to be spreading faster than the virus. In Australia, Chinese restaurants are struggling to survive as their customer numbers have plummeted.

The list of examples of anti-Chinese racism could go on and on.

Facing deadly infectious diseases, it is, of course, normal that we feel scared or anxious. However, racism and any act of discrimination driven by such fear is completely unacceptable. As Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, the coronavirus is a public health event, not a matter of ethnicity or nationality, “Even though the virus started in Wuhan, it doesn’t respect nationality or race. It does not check your passport before it goes into your body. Anybody can be infected.”

A virus does not have a nationality, ethnicity or a race. Discrimination can be the most dangerous virus.

I studied in Australia for six years. In a sense, I have been educated in the West. Personally, I truly appreciate the pursuit of freedom of speech in Western countries and agree that this may be something the Chinese government needs to work on. But, the premise of freedom of speech is not to infringe upon the rights and dignity of others. While the Chinese people are suffering from this calamity and are united as one in combating this “war without smoke,” attacking the country and its people in the name of “freedom of speech” is undoubtedly a retrogression of human civilization.

Epidemics have been rampant throughout human history, and they have often caused devastation. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that there is no stigma associated with any infectious disease, and the unnecessary and unhelpful profiling of individuals based on nationality or race.

Fighting the novel coronavirus, as we do here, is protecting both China and the world. On behalf of millions of ordinary people living in Wuhan, I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to the international community who has given us valuable moral and material support. China is not fighting alone. We believe “winter will eventually pass, and spring is sure to come.”