Wash Your Hands and Don’t Be Racist

Taiwanese-Spanish musician Chenta Tsai at Madrid Fashion Week, in January 2020.

This week, the coronavirus officially landed in NYC. At the time of publishing this article, there are currently 22 confirmed cases in the NYC metropolitan area, and over 1,000 residents in quarantine. 

I have been to several supermarkets and pharmacies in the past week, and all of them had sold out of hand-sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, gloves, masks and anti-bacterial spray. 

On Saturday morning in a tweet, US Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams urged people to stop panic buying masks, as the rush was causing a shortage for those who actually needed them - medical workers and those who were actually sick. 

Yet today, Rep Matt Gaetz made headlines by wearing a full-on gas mask onto the House floor to vote for a bill that would approve billions of dollars of emergency funding towards fighting the spread of the flu-like virus. 

The now global virus first emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, which is still on lockdown. Coronavirus is contagious, but in our hyper-connected modern world, nothing seems to spread as quickly as misinformation, fear-mongering and xenophobia. 

It began with a ‘bat soup’ video, shared by British newspaper The Daily Mail, whose headline read: “Revolting footage shows Chinese woman eating a whole bat at a fancy restaurant as scientists link the deadly coronavirus to the flying mammals”. The sensationalist story soon blazed across Facebook, and rumors of the virus being caused by Chinese people eating bat soup, and anti-Chinese sentiment, began to build. 

While it’s true that some coronaviruses originate from bats, it’s not a particularly common dish, and the video in question was actually a travel-vlog from 2016. The article is a prime example of culture being ripped from its context to support a racist, fear-mongering, sensationalist narrative, the shares of which far outnumber the “corrections” these news platforms publish later. 

To be clear: those of Chinese descent are not any more likely to contract or spread Coronavirus than anybody else, and there is no evidence that the current strain, COVID-19, originated in bats. But from verbal attacks in France to physical attacks in Britain, it is clear that there is a different, more deadly type of virus spreading rapidly, that we all need to be washing our hands of: and that virus is hate.