A South Korean lady told Shenzhen Daily that some locals saw her and her compatriots differently after they returned to Shenzhen last month, apparently due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in her home country at that time.
The pain of being stigmatized and misunderstood was relieved after staffers of the property management company and some neighbors offered to help as they began a 14-day quarantine at home.
Stigma arising from COVID-19 runs rampant around the world. In China, Hubei people were stigmatized at the height of the epidemic. In other parts of the world, Chinese and Asians were victims of a stigma associated with the coronavirus.
Stigma not only evokes hostility but can also lead to discrimination and illegal acts that harm the rights and interests of those being stigmatized.
After the Spring Festival, some jobseekers from Hubei, the hardest-hit region in the outbreak, had to sleep on the street near a job market in Longhua District because all hotels turned them down as soon as they presented their Hubei ID cards. Subdistrict and community officials stepped in to help them after their plight was reported by local media.
In the epidemic’s darkest moments, people from Hubei, especially Wuhan, were discriminated against in one way or another, such as by being denied service or by facing unwarranted questions and suspicion, even from longtime neighbors.
When one of my neighbors was spotted talking to a community medical worker outside of our housing estate at around midnight last month after he returned to Shenzhen from his hometown in Hubei, a commotion erupted in a WeChat group of homeowners, some raising a lot of questions that he and his family were not legally obliged to answer, including why neighbors were not told about his return beforehand and whether he was trying to sneak into the housing estate in the middle of the night. His wife spent a lot of time explaining in the WeChat group that he wore a face mask and avoided crowds even when going to the toilet the entire way back to the city, that his hometown had no infection cases, and that he followed every word community officials told him, including receiving a test at a designated place upon arrival and starting a 14-day quarantine at home after the test gave him the all-clear. His wife’s lengthy explanation eventually calmed the jittery, excessively inquisitive homeowners. The family ultimately won praise from many neighbors for their compliance with quarantine rules and patient communication with neighbors.
Stigmatization can lead to xenophobia and hatred and even attacks against people of Asian origin. A Singaporean student at UCL in Britain was attacked last month by four men, with one of them shouting “I don’t want coronavirus in our country.” In New York, a woman punched a 23-year-old Asian woman in the face and made anti-Asian slurs on March 10. Later that evening, a 59-year-old man in New York said he was approached by a suspect who used anti-Asian remarks and then kicked him, causing him to fall.
When the novel coronavirus was officially named COVID-19 last month, the World Health Organization made it clear that a name for a virus should not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, to prevent the use of names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing.
Even so, there are still people who are relentlessly trying to stigmatize China and Wuhan. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. politicians publicly referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” “Wuhan coronavirus” or “China coronavirus” earlier this month.
Their use of the terms immediately drew condemnation from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang, who said some U.S. politicians should be chastised for stigmatizing China and Wuhan. Although Wuhan is the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic, the origin of the virus remains a mystery.
There has been a false perception that China is prone to zoonotic diseases. Viruses know no boundaries and can strike any country. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. The early outbreaks of 2009 H1N1 occurred in North America in April 2009. The 2009 pandemic killed 151,700-575,400 people worldwide during the first year the virus circulated, according to the estimate of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those who stigmatize others can become victims of stigma themselves at some point. It would be naive to assume that any particular country will never be the origin of an epidemic.
In the face of the epidemic, stigma and misinformation are the common enemies of the world as they render the fight against the epidemic less effective. Countries should stand united rather than point accusing fingers at others and stigmatize a whole nation or a city.
Now the highly contagious virus is bringing down an increasing number of people around the world, it is essential that people around the world reject rumors, bias and stigma, stick to facts and science, and work together to defeat the virus.
(The author is a deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.)