Working as an Epidemiologist During the COVID-19 Pandemic Reminded Me of the Time When the Black Death Reached San Francisco

The worst parts were the xenophobia and misinformation, then and now.

Anti-vaccine political cartoon in Chinese, where the people who created and/or advocated for vaccination are forced to get the plague vaccine and develop the disease from it. All things old are new again.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I took a phone call from a concerned citizen who called the county response phone number. The call was routed to me because the people answering the phones didn’t know what to do with it. The caller wanted to let us know that he had seen “a group of Asians” outside a fast food restaurant near his apartment building. “I think you need to check it out,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re Chinese, and they’re probably carrying the virus. You need to detain them,” he said. He wanted us to detain and quarantine or isolate every person of Asian descent in the county.

Needless to say, it wasn’t going to happen.

While the Novel Coronavirus 2 (NCoV-2) that causes COVID originated in Wuhan, China, there has never been evidence that people of Asian descent living in the United States in 2019 and 2020 brought the virus in. In fact, the first cases of COVID-19 detected in our county originated in a group of American tourists who had been to the Middle East. What the caller was exhibiting was…