Since the time coronavirus (COVAD-19) surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan in mid-December 2019, it is perhaps the hottest potato in town. Public health officials throughout the world are struggling to confine this epidemic from mutating into a full-fledged global pandemic.
While the public health authorities have been inevitably attending the clinical dimensions of this flare-up, another pestilence has been spreading more hastily over the globe: racist fear-mongering. The latter may prove to be far riskier as both may exasperate each other.
As Pakistan officially reports its first-ever confirmed coronavirus case on February 27, the Chinese borders stay closed for an indefinite period. There is an impending threat of increased output costs for the nascent local industry that continues to import a majority of the raw materials from China. Though the fears for the outbreak continue to mount in Pakistan, yet the media and critical analysts have refrained far from misreporting to delineate this epidemic as the fundamental fault of any specific nation.
On the global front, the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus has only uncovered the long outstanding and deeply entrenched sentiments of Chinese prejudice in Canada, North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, which is no longer limited to Sino-phobia.
As the world comes under fire from the hastily spreading coronavirus, the responsibility is on all of us to prevent this epidemic from transforming into a full-blown global racist fear-mongering phenomenon
A cursory view of the global news headlines carefully paints the dismal picture of the globalization of racist fear-mongering propaganda. Australian, French and American news agencies have been accused of adding a flavor of racism in their reporting of this upheaval – while a few sources have been allegedly reporting this virus as “Wuhan Coronavirus” which sounds irrational.
The Sino-phobia prevailing today, corresponding to a disease that could have easily begun from any country, is deeply established in the plenteous grounds of a substantially more across the board xenophobia. The latest report released by Amnesty International in February 2020 over this burning issue titled “seven ways the coronavirus affects human rights” has listed racism as one of the primary repercussions of this virus outbreak.
As per the latest news reports, local restaurants in Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong have allegedly started to draw a line at Chinese buyers. In a similar vein, recently a local group of protestors in Indonesia disgracefully called off the Chinese guests boarding a famous hotel. This is extremely unjust, for pandemics can emerge anywhere as viruses have no race, nationality, and ethnicity.
Through the lens of history, Leprosy, which became a pandemic in the middle ages, had its origins from Europe. Likewise in the 15th century, the Spanish colonialists in the Caribbean brought with them some contagious diseases such as smallpox, measles and bubonic plague to overwhelmingly pass them onto the local natives. Moreover, the great plague of London is estimated to have killed almost twenty percent of the local populace in 1655. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, was first diagnosed in the US in 1981 but is considered to have its origins in Africa. The treatment of the newly outburst disease depends upon its origins and impacts i.e. Is the virus currently out breaking in the global north? If so, then the virus is given its numerical description (e.g. H1N1) or referenced to the vector or carrier of the disease (e.g. Swine Flu or Mad Cow disease). But on the flip side, if it is started involuntarily in a country where the global north breeds stereotypes than it is merely named after the specific region – as with Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) Asian Flu and now, “Wuhan Coronavirus” – is a great way to play on xenophobic grounds.
In recent times, Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric and discrimination for people of color and white supremacist agenda are aggravating the flames of racially prejudiced reaction to the Coronavirus.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus has now become the medical terminology for the unbridled globalized xenophobia that was tormenting the world long before the start of this most recent outbreak. Yet it is imperative to sufficiently recognize that the bias against Asians is not an infant concept; that continues bitterly to nurture in the global north and ruthlessly exposed with some global events like coronavirus outbreak in late 2019.
Like for instance, the phrase “Yellow Peril” has been cynically used to vilify Asian immigrants in the Global North since the nineteenth century. As the world comes under fire from the hastily spreading coronavirus, the responsibility is on all of us to prevent this epidemic from transforming into a full-blown global racist fear-mongering phenomenon.
The writer is a chartered accountant who currently works in the public sector of Pakistan