Asian American health workers fight virus and racist attacks
NEW YORK ( AP) — Medical student Natty Jumreornvong has a vaccine and protective gear to shield her from the coronavirus. But she couldn’t avoid exposure to the anti-Asian bigotry that pulsed to the surface after the pathogen was first identified in China.
Psychiatry patients have called her by a racist slur for the disease, she said. A bystander spat at the Thaiborn student to “go back to China” as she left a New York City hospital where she’s training.
And as she walked there in scrubs Feb. 15, a man came up to her, snarled “Chinese virus,” took her cellphone and dragged her on a sidewalk, said Jumreornvong, who reported the attack to police. The investigation is ongoing.
For health care workers of Asian and Pacific Islander descent, “it seems like we’re fighting multiple battles at the same time — not just COVID-19, but also racism,” says Jumreornvong, a student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have faced a tide of harassment and attacks in many settings during the pandemic. But those in health care are feeling the particular, jarring anguish of being racially targeted because of the virus while toiling to keep people from dying of it.
“People in my community have gone from being a health care hero to, somehow, a scapegoat,” said Dr. Michelle Lee, a radiology resident in New York. She rallied 100 white-coat-clad medical workers in March to denounce anti-Asian hate crimes.
“We’re not bringing you the virus,” said Lee, who recalls strangers on the street spitting on her twice in the last year. “We are literally trying to help you get rid of the virus.”
People of Asian and Pacific Islander descent make up about 6% to 8% of the U.S. population but a greater share of some health care professions, including around 20% of non-surgeon physicians and pharmacists and 12% to 15% of surgeons, physical therapists and physician assistants, according to federal statistics.
Before the pandemic, studies found that 31% to 50% of doctors of Asian heritage experienced on-the-job discrimination ranging from patients refusing their care to difficulty finding mentors. That’s a lower proportion than Black physicians, but higher than Hispanic and white doctors, according to a 2020 study that reviewed existing research. In a separate 2020 study of medical residents, all those of Asian heritage said patients had quizzed them about their ethnicity.
Columbia University medical student Hueyjong “Huey” Shih recalls being confronted with “a lot of assumptions, all boiled into one very inappropriate question” from a colleague in a hospital: Was Shih an only child because of China’s former one-child policy?
The Maryland-born Shih, whose family hails from Taiwan, said the colleague apologized after being set straight. Writing in the health news site Stat, he and medical students Jesper Ke
and Kate E. Lee implored health institutions to include Asian Americans’ and Pacific Islanders’ experiences in anti-racism training.
For generations, Asian Americans have contended with being perceived as “perpetual foreigners” in a country with a history of treating them as threats. Officials wrongly blamed San Francisco’s Chinatown
for an 1870s smallpox outbreak, barred many Chinese immigrants under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and forced Japanese Americans into internment camps even as tens of thousands of their relatives served in the U.S. military during World War II.
During the pandemic, former President Donald Trump repeatedly called
COVID-19 the “China virus” and by other terms that activists say fanned anger at Asian Americans.
Police reports of anti-Asian hate crimes in 26 big U.S. cities and counties shot up 146% last year, while hate crimes overall rose 2%, according to California State University, San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.