Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Kittens or puppies? Animals left at shelter turned out to be foxes — again.

A teen dropped out of high school during WWII. Now 99, she just graduated.

Would you eat this weird sandwich? Barry Enderwick would. 

A hidden threat

How cockroaches came to rule the world

This ‘doomsday’ glacier is more vulnerable than scientists once thought

How to find hidden cameras in an Airbnb, according to a security expert

Just how dangerous is turbulence? 

The race up a Hong Kong tower covered in 40 feet of buns

Miss Manners: Is a gift registry for young kids the new normal?

My partner’s parenting makes me look like the ‘wicked’ stepmom

Ask Amy: I long for friendships with women. How do I find them?

Washingtonians want Commanders to return to D.C., Post-Schar School poll finds

Nats shift from uplifting to deflating during a 10-0 loss to the Twins

Keibert Ruiz is supposed to be a Nationals pillar, not an unexpected drag

The sooner the FDIC ‘boys club’ gets a new leader, the better

The military is encroaching on Mexican democracy

Iran has lost its president. Its people need to regain their freedom.

Alito and Thomas haven’t recused. Why?

How Trumpworld convinced itself that the feds aimed to take out Trump 

Down-ballot Democrats work to boost Biden with updraft coattails: ‘We push him’

In photos: Deadly tornadoes devastate southwest Iowa

Where heat waves might cause blackouts: Look up your area

In photos: Iranians attend funeral of fallen president Ebrahim Raisi 

An antipasto tuna salad puts all those refrigerator jars to good use

Antipasto Tuna Salad

Cauliflower gets the Marbella treatment in this satisfying sheet-pan dish

Israel recalls envoys after Norway, Ireland and Spain recognize Palestinian state

Pentagon’s maritime aid operation faces immediate obstacles in Gaza

Rain-soaked Sunak calls July 4 U.K. election; polls forecast end of Tory rule

How social media can avoid fueling another Jan. 6

Meta walked away from news. Now the company’s using it for AI content.

In novel case, U.S. charges man with making child sex abuse images with AI

WAUKESHA, WI - MAY 1st: Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday May 1st, 2024.  (Photo by Sara Stathas for the Washington Post)

Health

Well+Being

Opinions

Higher Education

Education

https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

Coronavirus pandemic

Allie Caren

Lucy Li tries not to let fear dictate her interactions with patients as she makes the rounds in the covid-19 intensive care unit. But the anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot erase the memory of what happened after work at the start of the pandemic. 

A man followed the Chinese American doctor from the Boston hospital, spewing a profanity-laced racist tirade as she walked to the subway. “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?” Li recalled the man shouting. “What is wrong with you? Why the f--- are you killing us?”

Stunned at first, then relieved she was not physically attacked, Li is now saddened and angered by the irony that she spends her days and nights helping save lives. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has grown riskier since the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> emerged — 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, 28, wary that one of her patients, too, could harbor such prejudices. “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.”

Olivia Falcigno

Across the country, Asian American <a href="https://www.thelily.com/im-an-asian-american-doctor-on-the-front-lines-of-two-wars-coronavirus-and-racism/" target=_blank>health-care workers</a> have reported a rise in bigoted incidents. The racial hostility has left Asian Americans, who represent 6 percent of the U.S. population but <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm" target=_blank>18 percent</a> of the country’s physicians and <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm" target=_blank>10 percent</a> of its nurse practitioners, in a painful position on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. 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.

Asian Americans have experienced a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/02/targeting-asians-asian-americans-will-make-it-harder-stop-covid-19/">sharp increase</a> in racist verbal abuse and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/us/coronavirus-racist-attacks-against-asian-americans/index.html">physical attacks</a> during the pandemic, with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/hate-crimes-against-asian-americans-have-been-declining-years-will-coronavirus-change-that/" target="_blank">FBI warning</a> of a potential surge in hate crimes against Asians as the coronavirus death toll mounts and stay-at-home orders are lifted.

“People are worried about transmission of a disease that they associate with foreignness and Asian faces,” said Grace Kao, a Yale University sociologist. “Nothing erases what we look like.”

There is no comprehensive data measuring anti-Asian bias during the pandemic. An <a href="http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/STOP_AAPI_HATE_MONTHLY_REPORT_4_23_20.pdf" target="_blank">analysis</a> of self-reported incidents by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/08/coronavirus-spreads-so-does-online-racism-targeting-asians-new-research-shows/">Russell Jeung</a>, chairman of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University, shows a steady rise in reports of harassment and assault against Asians since mid-March, with <a href="http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/STOP_AAPI_HATE_MONTHLY_REPORT_4_23_20.pdf" target="_blank">twice as many women</a> than men saying they have been mistreated.

Photo by Hengky Lim

Jeung, who is researching racism and xenophobia amid the pandemic, said a multilingual <a href="http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/stop-aapi-hate/" target="_blank">website</a> set up by his department in a partnership with civil rights groups to document anti-Asian harassment has recorded more than 1,800 reports since its March 19 launch. Victims said they were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/chinese-coronavirus-racist-attacks.html" target="_blank">spat on</a>, <a href="https://www.ktsm.com/news/report-sams-club-stabbing-suspect-thought-family-was-chinese-infecting-people-with-coronavirus/" target="_blank">stabbed while shopping</a>, shunned for wearing masks and barred from entering ride-hailing vehicles.

Some academic experts on race say President Trump’s rhetoric around the virus and China has contributed to the rise in racial harassment. For weeks, Trump deliberately referred to the coronavirus as the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/20/coronavirus-trump-chinese-virus/">Chinese virus</a>” despite <a href="https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234604060420005888">guidance from public health officials</a> to avoid attaching locations or ethnicity to a disease. He has since tweeted that Asian Americans are not to be blamed for the virus’s spread.

“Words matter. People are making that close association between the virus and Chinese people because he insisted on using that term,” Jeung said.

During a media briefing last week,  Trump <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-briefing-covid-19-testing/">lashed out</a> at CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, who is Chinese American, telling her to “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-ask-china-response-to-cbss-weijia-jiang-shocked-the-room--and-was-part-of-a-pattern/2020/05/12/a04bed28-947d-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html">Ask China</a>!” after she questioned him on why he insisted on making testing a global competition at a time when so many lives are being lost. Jiang previously tweeted that a White House official had called the virus “<a href="https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1239923246801334283?lang=en" target="_blank">the Kung-Flu</a>” to her face.

White House adviser Peter Navarro, in an <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-adviser-continues-focus-china-amid-criticism-coronavirus/story?id=70723322" target="_blank">ABC News interview</a> Sunday, accused China of sending “hundreds of thousands of Chinese” to “seed” the coronavirus around the world. And Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) drew criticism after he blamed the virus’s spread on “thugs in China” in a high school <a href="https://www.omaha.com/news/state_and_regional/watch-now-sasse-ridicules-people-named-jeremy-trying-to-joke-rips-thugs-in-china-in/article_115b3a24-e69d-5e47-8e4f-8730652bd785.html" target="_blank">graduation speech</a> over the weekend.

The coronavirus and the long history of using diseases to justify xenophobia

Jeung said he expects 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.

“With the China-bashing and with the economy tanking and more deaths from covid-19, we expect anti-Asian bias to only increase,” Jeung said. “People make automatic assumptions, especially in times of threats, and go into fight-or-flight mode. The fight mode is attacking or harassing Asians, and the flight mode is shunning Asians.”

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has encouraged Asian Americans to step up and “show our American-ness in ways we never have before,” in response to the rise in racist abuse. In a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/andrew-yang-coronavirus-discrimination/">controversial op-ed</a> last month, he called on Asian Americans to be part of the “cure.”

But many Asian Americans felt offended by seemingly having to justify their existence. “It shouldn’t matter if you’re a front-line worker,” said <a href="https://www.ted.com/speakers/esther_choo" target=_blank>Esther Choo</a>, an emergency-room physician in Portland, Ore., who hosts a <a href="https://www.radio.com/media/podcast/doctors-log" target=_blank>podcast</a> on the coronavirus pandemic. “Every time something like this happens, there’s this wave of, ‘But we’re so good, and we don’t deserve this.’ No, you don’t deserve this because you’re human.”

Being a front-line worker didn’t help Li — and when she texted her colleagues to warn them before they left work, one of them responded with her own story of being harassed just a week earlier.

Gem Manalo, a Mass General anesthesiology resident who is of Chinese and Filipino descent, was riding the “T,” as the subway is called in Boston, across the river to Cambridge for a yoga class in early March when she said a man starting yelling: “F--- China! F--- the Chinese!”

“I was too scared to look at him,” said Manalo, 29. A stranger recorded the incident with her phone and assured Manalo that she would defend her if the man tried to physically harm her.

“He kept saying things like: ‘You people eat bats! Watch my YouTube channel tonight, and I’ll tell the real story.’ He kept saying: ‘F--- China. F--- the Chinese,’ over and over,” Manalo said.

“Here I am in the hospital, working in all these makeshift ICUs,” Manalo said. “We’re all at a loss, too, trying to come up with new protocols to keep everybody safe, and this guy is telling me that I am terrible.”

Hate crimes against Asian Americans have been declining for years. Will the coronavirus change that?

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.”

Li, who was born in New Jersey to Chinese immigrant parents, was too shocked to respond and immediately wondered if she had done something wrong. But a white intern told the patient that her comments were unacceptable.

“Part of the unsettling piece of racism is you’re never sure if it’s something you as an individual did or if it’s something that’s immutable and larger than yourself,” said Li, 28. “There was a sense of a little bit of guilt and shame for having forgotten what it was like to be marginalized in that way.”

In Los Angeles County, Hengky Lim, a 44-year-old nurse practitioner from Indonesia, said he approached an ER patient 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,” Lim recalled the patient shouting. Then the patient walked out of the ER.

In April, when Lim, dressed in a hazmat suit, was treating patients with covid-19 symptoms in a tent outside the main hospital, he said a man who came in with chest pain, difficulty breathing and a persistent cough declined Lim’s assistance and returned to see the nurse who had taken his vitals. That nurse, who was white, later told Lim that the patient said he did not want to be seen by an Asian provider because he thought he had contracted the coronavirus from a Chinese man coughing near him at a store, Lim recalled.

“I asked the nurse, ‘Are you sure it was a Chinese man?’ It’s just stereotyping, assuming everyone who is Asian is Chinese and has coronavirus,” Lim said. He tried to treat the patient anyway, telling him that he was his only choice and that he would take care of him. But the man left after spitting into a cup for the coronavirus test — and did not bother getting the X-ray or EKG that Lim had ordered for him.

Lim said he had never before encountered such discrimination during his 10 years in nursing, but it has become such a common experience among his Asian colleagues that he thought about quitting.

“Everybody is scared. I’m putting myself out there only to be treated this way. It’s very disheartening,” he said. “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.”

As the coronavirus spreads, so does online racism targeting Asians, new research shows

This spring in Seattle, Amy Zhang was wearing scrubs, walking to her 13-hour night shift as an anesthesiology resident, when a man began cursing at her a block away from the hospital.

“F--- you, China, for giving us smallpox,” the man shouted at Zhang, the 29-year-old Chinese American doctor recalled. He followed her and continued yelling racial epithets. 

Zhang said the encounter shook her, affecting her ability to focus on her work at the start of her shift. “I was not in the best state of mind to help out with patient care,” she said.

And in Southern California, Audrey Sue Cruz, an internal-medicine doctor in Loma Linda, was conducting a telephone visit with a new patient recently when, 15 minutes into the appointment, the woman began grilling the physician on her medical education, work history and ethnicity.

Cruz told the patient that she is Filipina, to which she said the patient replied: “Wow. I can’t believe what your people did. I usually wouldn’t choose an Asian doctor, but you seem nice.”

Cruz quickly ended the visit. The incident inspired her to join more than a dozen other doctors in producing an <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IAmNotAVirus" target=_blank>#iamnotavirus</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhD_VFBLLK8&feature=youtu.be">video</a> 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.”

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/09/masks-racial-profiling-walmart-coronavirus/">Two black men say they were kicked out of Walmart for wearing protective masks. Others worry it will happen to them.</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/06/layoffs-race-poll-coronavirus/">Hispanics are almost twice as likely as whites to have lost their jobs amid pandemic, poll finds</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/05/undocumented-immigrants-coronavirus/" target=_blank>Undocumented workers among those hit first — and worst — by the coronavirus shutdown</a>

Knight-Wallace Fellowship at University of Michigan, 2015, studied "Morality and Money in Medicine"

Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, 2013, "Broken City" series

National Headliner Award 2008, First Place in Education Writing for "Last Chance for English High" series

Asian American Journalists Association 2005 National Journalism Award for "Life, on $9 an hour," a narrative on Oregon's working poor

Fulbright Fellowship, 2000

Two-time Livingston Award for Young Journalists finalist

National Association of Black Journalists 2019 Salute to Excellence Award in national investigative reporting for "The Gatekeeper"

National Association of Black Journalists 2019 Salute to Excellence Award in national business reporting for "The Forgotten Ferguson"

George Polk Award for Justice Reporting 2021 for "George Floyd's America" 

Online News Association 2021 Excellence in Social Justice Reporting Online Journalism Award for “George Floyd’s America” 

National Association of Black Journalists 2021 Salute to Excellence Award in national feature writing for “What Reparations Mean to One American Family”

National Association of Black Journalists 2021 Salute to Excellence Award in national investigative reporting for “This is What Happens to Us”

National Headliner Award 2021, Second Place in Business Coverage for "Corporate America's Racial Reckoning”

National Association of Black Journalists 2022 Salute to Excellence Award in national business reporting for "The 'whitewashing' of Black Wall Street"

National Association of Black Journalists 2022 Salute to Excellence Award in national news series for "Corporate Racial Justice Promises"

Stanford University, BA in communication

Stanford University, MA in sociology

Tracy Jan is a deputy health and science editor. She joined The Post in 2016 to launch a beat on the intersection of race and the economy, writing about systemic racism, immigration and housing through the lens of money and power for more than five years. She previously was a national political reporter at the Boston Globe.