Although there are suspicions and on-going investigations on the true origins of the coronavirus disease, in the month of December of 2019, the first human cases were identified in the Hubei Province of China capital, Wuhan. The symptoms of the disease include fever, pneumonia, malaise, dry cough, and dyspnea. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease is believed to be primarily transmitted from person to person through droplets of respiratory fluids from a person infected such as from coughing, sneezing, or even talking.

However, there is still not much known about the virus until today. People have been getting tested positive with having the virus, not knowing how they even got it in the first place. As of August 2, 2020, there have been an estimated 18 million cases world-wide, and almost 700,000 deaths from those cases. People are still waiting on a vaccine as they’d hope to continue to pursue their normal lives before this pandemic has started.

Because the first cases of the disease have been identified and reported from the East-Asian country of China, since the early months of this global pandemic, there have been a large increase of reports of incidents fueled by xenophobia and racism, more specifically so towards Asians around the world.

Xenophobia is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as dislike or prejudice against people from other countries. The similar term, racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

Throughout social media, there have been people making xenophobic anti-immigration and anti-diversity arguments that link the spread of the disease with diversity. In January, someone posted on telegram saying “...If we lived in a serious country, run by White men who have our best interests at heart, there would be zero immigration into America from the get go, deadly virus or not”. There was a tweet that followed up with this telegram message and tried to justify it by saying, “Notice how none of these deadly global virus outbreaks originate from the US”. In March, there was even a trending hashtag on twitter called “TravelBanNow”, calling to end foreigners from immigrating to the United States.

Xenophobia and racism since this pandemic does not only happen in social media, but it happens directly towards people who are of asian heritage as well. There are properties being vandalized, people are being verbally harassed, others being falsely accused of having the virus, and some are even being physically assaulted. On February 13 in Los Angeles, a sixteen year old asian-american student was bullied and physically assaulted just because of his asian heritage and the fear that he may have the virus. Although the details of the attack were not released by the school, it was still severe enough that the victim had to be sent to the hospital.

According to a Facebook post, on April 19 in San Francisco, a woman had verbally attacked an asian-american woman who is just walking her dog, telling her, “Go back to whatever fucking country you came from...nasty people should stay in fucking Asia”. Internationally, there are similar situations ensuing in Daegu, South Korea (wherein a religious minority group, Shincheonji Church of Jesus, is currently being scapegoated and harassed even online through platforms such as reddit as the cause of coronavirus in South Korea), which further shows that such hatred happens even in Asian countries. There are documented cases of going against now, he stays quiet.

In order to speak out against the accusations, there is a new channel that shows the truth about Shincheonji and has a collection of Shincheonji testimony, called Shincheonji TV. You may also like to visit https://nhne.tv/videos/.

At the end of the day, everyone is human and at some point, history has proven itself that not only China is the only country in the world that came out with a virus. The humane thing is to help one another to fight this pandemic together rather than point fingers about who is at fault.