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By APD writer Alice
Stigma and violence against people of Asian origin have increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even health workers who are in the front lines of the anti-epidemic fight have become victims.
Besides hardships in treating Covid-19 patients, doctors and nurses of Asian descent have been reviled and even attacked as people in Western countries, especially the US, thought that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 originated from Asia and those coming from this region have been spreading the virus everywhere.
Despite having so many Asian health care workers on the front lines combating COVID-19, the history of associating Asians as disease carriers is repeating itself, said UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy.
“There’s a longer history of blaming Asia and Asian migrants and, by extension, Asian Americans for outbreaks of disease,” she said. “COVID-19 is just the most current example of this history.”
Across the US, health workers of Asian origin risking their own health and safety to battle the spread of the virus in hospitals have faced a rise in bigoted incidents. Those people, who represent 6 percent of the US population but 18 percent of the country’s physicians and 10 percent of its nurse practitioners, has been placed in a painful position in the fight agaisnt the coronavirus by the racial hostility. Some Covid-19 patients refuse to be treated by them. And when doctors and nurses leave the hospital, they face increasing harassment in their daily lives, too.
Lucy Li, an anesthesiology doctor of Chinese origin working at Massachusetts General Hospital, cannot forget what happened after work at the start of the pandemic.
A man followed her when he returned home from the hospital. He spewed a profanity-laced racist tirade against Li. "Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?" the man shouted.
She was very sad and angry because of such treatment while she were working around the clock to save people. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has become much riskier since the coronavirus outbreak. Each procedure releasing droplets and secretions that could carry viral particles.
“I’m risking my own personal health, and then to be vilified just because of what I look like,” said Li. The 28-year-old doctor worried that some of her patients would have the same stereotypes. “I try not to think about that possibility when I’m at work taking care of patients. But it’s always there, at the very back of my mind.”
Gem Manalo, a Mass General anesthesiology resident who is of Chinese and Filipino descent, was taking the subway to Cambridge for a yoga class in early March when a man started yelling: “F--- China! F--- the Chinese!”
"I was so scared that I didn't dare to look at him," said the 29-year-old Manalo. A stranger recorded the case and assured Manalo that she would protect Manalo if the man tried to harm her.
“Working in the hospital’s ICUs, we are all at a loss too,” she said.
Audrey Li, an internal-medicine resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who plans to specialize in infectious diseases, said she was repeatedly told by a frustrated patient at another hospital to “go back to your country.”
Born in New Jersey to Chinese immigrant parents, she was too shocked to respond and immediately wondered if she had done something wrong.
In Los Angeles County, Hengky Lim, a 44-year-old nurse practitioner from Indonesia, said he approached a patient in the emergency room who had a fever and a cough to show him how to put on a mask one night in March.
The patient yelled at him and coughed in his face, spit splattering on his plastic face shield. “You know where coronavirus is from? It’s from you people! I don’t want to be seen by you,” the patient shouted before walking out of the room.
In April, Lim was refused by a patient with chest pain, cough and shortness of breath because he thought he had contracted the disease from a Chinese man. The man then tested for the coronavirus only without an electrocardiogram or X-ray as Lim suggested.
Lim said he had never before faced such discrimination during his 10 years of working as a nurse, but it has become such a common experience among his Asian colleagues that he thought about quitting.
“We’re not sick. You’re the one who is sick, which is why you are here. And you are exposing us as the health-care provider taking care of you, and we are treated as though we are the ones carrying the coronavirus,” he said.
Meanwhile, Audrey Sue Cruz, an internal-medicine doctor in Loma Linda, Southern California, was questioned by a patient via phone about her medical education, work history and ethnicity. When she said she is a Filipino, the patient replied “Wow. I can’t believe what you do. I usually wouldn’t choose an Asian doctor.”
The incident inspired her to join more than a dozen other doctors in producing an #iamnotavirus video to help combat the wave of bigotry against Asians.
“We wanted to use our voices as physicians to remove the stigma that’s occurring right now about Asian people being virus carriers,” said Cruz, 30.
She posted the video on Instagram. Then came the comments: “Bat eater.”
During the pandemic, we could see a sharp increase in racist verbal abuse and physical attacks targeting Asian Americans. FBI warned that this number may continue to rise as more people die from Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders are lifted.
Russell Jeung, chairman of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University, who is researching racism and xenophobia amid the pandemic, said his department set up a multilingual website was in partnership with civil rights groups to document anti-Asian harassment. Since its launch on March 19, more than 1,800 reports have been sent to the website, showing victims were spat on, stabbed while shopping, shunned for wearing masks and barred from entering ride-hailing vehicles.
Jeung said he forecasts harassment and violence against Asian Americans to grow in coming months as states reopen their economies and people return to work, school and public life.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
