The Coronavirus Outbreak

How Is the U.S. Being Affected?

Updated Feb. 29, 2020

In San Francisco, recent immigrants from China said they were worrying
about the very real health threats facing loved ones who are still there,
while encountering the fears of others in their own daily lives in the
United States. Yihao Xie, an environmental researcher at a San
Francisco-based nonprofit organization, traveled back to the United
States from Lanzhou, China, his hometown, early on Jan. 30 — narrowly
beating the shutdown of airline travel.

Although Lanzhou is far from Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, his co-
workers in the United States thought it best for him to stay home from
the office for 14 days. He said he understood.

Since then, he took a walk in a nature preserve near his house to calm
himself. At the grocery store, he said he felt the eyes of strangers
appraising him.

“A few folks were giving me looks,” he said. “I don’t think they were
malicious or hostile, but ‘Why are you wearing a mask — are you
sick?’”

Robert Li, a resident of San Francisco, was browsing phones at a

computer store last week when he overheard an employee talking with a
customer about the outbreak. “‘Of course, if you eat raw bats, you’re
going to get coronavirus,’” he recalled hearing the worker saying.

“They were basically making fun of Asians,” said Mr. Li, who is
ethnically Chinese. “This is part of a racial trope that Chinese people eat
everything.”

Immigration from China was once effectively banned under the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, the first anti-immigrant law directed at a specific
nationality.
The Chinese population in the United States began to grow significantly
after 1965, when restrictions on immigration were loosened, and it
exploded after 1980. At that time, fewer than 500,000 immigrants from
China lived in the United States; now there are close to 5 million,
primarily concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and
San Jose, Calif., according to the Pew Research Center.

News of the coronavirus outbreak comes on the heels of a trade fight

with China that already had created uncertainty and economic worries
for some.

“If you are already conditioned to fear China or Chinese people, this
gives you another reason,” said Vincent Pan, co-executive director of
Chinese for Affirmative Action, a civil rights organization in San
Francisco that has called on California agencies to arrange hotlines to
collect information on bullying or discrimination related to the virus.

“Disease is a really powerful way to turn one group of people against

another group of people,” he said. “Historically, disease has been a really
fast way to ‘other-ize’ a community. It’s a tricky balance, because we
also don’t want as a society to minimize public health concerns.”

Around the nation in recent weeks, health officials have issued warnings
that walk a delicate line: trying to protect the public without prompting
needless alarm and xenophobia. Since January, local, state and federal
health officials have repeated a single message, that the risk of
contracting coronavirus in the United States remains low.

“Ethnicity does not influence transmission of the novel coronavirus,”

Jeanne Ayers, a Wisconsin health officer, said last week, after
announcing that a resident in Madison, the capital, had contracted the
state’s first case of coronavirus. “It is travel history and direct close
contact with a case,” she said, explaining how medical officials believe
the person was infected.

So far, the coronavirus outbreak has largely been contained in the United
States by the federal authorities’ decision weeks ago to sharply curtail
flights from China, and to place the small trickle of travelers who had
been to China recently in two-week periods of quarantine on military
bases or isolation in their homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/16/us/coronavirus-american-mood.html
Activity I.

Match the words/phrases (1-10) with the meanings (a-o) based on news
article 2 above.

a. Not spread out

b. To make approach impossible
1. Malicious (k) (o) (c) c. Violently destructive effect
2. Encountering (h) d. Outbreak
3. Concentrated (d) e. Making judgement
4. Appraising (e) f. To hear without the speaker’s
5. Overheard (f) (g) knowledge
g. Cliche
6. Trope (i) h. Immediately following
7. Delicate line (j) i. Differentiate
8. Curtail (l) j. Marked by great precision or
9. Trickle (m) sensitivity
10. Quarantine (b) (a) (n) k. Harmful
l. To make less by or as if by cutting
off
m. Slow movement
n. A restraint to prevent the spread of
disease
o. Sudden often violent clash