Ultimately the rhetoric of blame doesn’t help to solve any of the problems we currently face. It is easier to feel distrust towards “all Chinese” than towards the Chinese person living next door.
I am reminded of Brexit, and how it was often areas with the fewest EU migrants that voted to leave, while those with the most were happier about having deep ties to our neighbours. Third, fear and uncertainty drive much of the xenophobia discussed in the book. The World Health Organization has tried to rectify the situation by referring to variants using the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, delta etc), shifting the focus from “who is to blame” to “they’re here, how do we manage them”. All this can lead to entire groups of people being seen as “unclean” and “diseased”. Then came the “Kent variant” and the “Indian variant”. In early 2020, Sars-CoV-2 was labelled the “Wuhan virus”, and the “China virus”. But its people are not nor are the virologists who released data and genetic sequencing information to colleagues across the world, allowing them to make testing kits and vaccines. The Chinese government is responsible for its lack of transparency about how Covid-19 first emerged. Some key themes emerge from their analysis.įirst, we must differentiate government responses from those of citizens and scientists. The authors examine the experiences of, and attitudes towards, a number of groups that have found themselves in the spotlight at various points: Chinese people, ultra-Orthodox Jews, black and brown people and, finally, Donald Trump-supporting white Americans. Professors Zhou Xun and Sander Gilman explore this territory in their book ‘I Know Who Caused Covid-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia. People want to know whose fault Covid-19 is. This is perhaps why blame has become central to many discussions, with all the problems that brings. The questions of where it came from, and just who is responsible for all this devastation and loss, have assumed outsize importance. Basic freedoms that we took for granted were taken away in order to stop the spread of a dangerous virus.
With the restrictions needed to keep health services afloat, small businesses have gone under, city centres have been shuttered and people have spent months without seeing loved ones. People have lost family members to the disease, or suffered for months with long Covid. I t’s not surprising that Covid-19 has made people angry: their lives have become disrupted in unimaginable ways.