Chinese, COVID-19 positive people feel stigma
Ignorance may be bliss in some situations, but a lack of knowledge during a pandemic can lead to social stigma from those ascribing blame or risk of infection, say Asian Americans and people who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Stigma may take the form of social avoidance or rejection, gossip, physical violence or denial of service for health care, education, housing and employment. When the new coronavirus reached the United States, there were reports of Asian Americans being targeted nationwide in verbal and physical attacks linked to fears of COVID-19.
Marian Lien, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said that the incidence of local stigma has “very much increased” since early March, when local Asian American-owned restaurants and other establishments reported their business was down as much as 40%.
“There has been verbal harassment, which ranges from expletives to emphasizing ‘Asians don’t belong here,’” she said. “Whereas these kinds of bigoted comments were common enough, now there is an added layer of threat — a raised fist, a threatening look, spitting — all reinforcing the conditional way Asian Americans have been accepted in this country.”
Anyone of East Asian descent could become a scapegoat, Ms. Lien said.
“I think the fear, anxiety and increasing anger at stay-at-home orders and the experience of more and more job loss and financial insecurity is landing as a gut punch to the community easiest to scapegoat for these frustrations.”
People who have contracted COVID19 are also at risk. Kristen Linfante, of Mt. Lebanon, said she was talking to her mail carrier on April 30. She was wearing a face mask and mentioned that she’d had the virus in March and had recovered. The next day, she said, someone from the Castle Shannon-Mt. Lebanon post office called to say she would no longer be getting her mail delivered. She called the office and talked to a supervisor, who told her that she would have to send someone to pick up her mail at the post office from now on because of the virus, she said.
“I offered to show them my test results. He was having none of that.”
She made numerous calls to try to resolve the situation, including to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. On May 1, she said, the supervisor called her back and said her mail would be delivered. He did not provide an explanation for the change.
Because it is relatively early in the outbreak, data has yet to be collected by social scientists to determine how widespread COVID-19-related stigma is, but the World Health Organization, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Pennsylvania Health Department are so concerned that all have issued guidance on how to address and prevent it.
“We are certainly concerned about the potential for social stigma from COVID-19,” said Nate Wardle, state Health Department press secretary. “From the first cases in the United States, we were worried about potential stigmatization of people of Asian descent. But as we have seen [COVID-19] cases here in Pennsylvania, those concerns have increased to include anyone who tests positive, but also those in areas particularly affected, such as minority groups who work in life-sustaining jobs.
“The Wolf administration is working to ensure that communities do not feel threatened or at-risk because of COVID-19. This is already a difficult time for so many people, and we need all Pennsylvanians to be understanding of another. There are many people who are struggling with their health, struggling mentally, struggling financially, and we must be aware of that.”
In early April, Pennsylvania state police sent a letter to local, state and federal authorities reaffirming its commitment to enforce the state’s laws regarding crimes of hate and bias. There have been no reported arrests connected to COVID-19 stigma thus far.
“The Asian American community and other minority groups should know that the state police take every allegation of hate/bias crime seriously, and each complaint receives a full investigation,“said Col. Robert Evanchick, state police commissioner.” We will not tolerate hate or bias of any kind in Pennsylvania.”
As recently as March, President Donald Trump and conservative politicians and media were referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese coronavirus” or “Wuhan virus.” Mr. Trump later switched to calling it COVID-19, the term that the WHO coined in February so as not to refer to the origin of the outbreak.
In 2015, the World Health Organization established a new set of best practices for naming a disease, abandoning the former practice of naming it for its place of origin such as MERS for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a viral respiratory illness that was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012.
While the coronavirus may be novel, tagging a region in naming an infectious disease dates back to the 19th century, when cholera that originated in the Ganges Delta and spread worldwide was named “Asiatic cholera,” Mari Webel, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, observed in an online article in The Conversation.
“It’s going to take a lot more work to undo that kind of rhetoric in the long term, that this is this group’s fault,” said Ms. Webel, who holds a doctorate and whose research focus is on the relationship between infectious diseases and political and social change in Africa in the 20th century.
“We know how not to stigmatize people. We know how not to discriminate against people,” she said. “We need to be really deliberate in how we talk about the problem and to correct misinformation when we hear it, which is awkward but really important.
“The last thing we want right now is to have people suffering at home from this disease because they’re afraid of what a positive test would mean.”