Asians in the US least likely to get coronavirus infection despite racist assumptions of many, data suggests
- Data on Covid-19 infections and mortality in New York City broken down by ethnicity suggests Asians have the lowest infection and mortality rates of any group
- Similar figures from Los Angeles found Asians had the lowest infection rate among all groups
Cindy Song, a retired government employee living in Washington, saw the Covid-19 storm coming and hunkered down.
Alerted by Chinese friends on social media about the danger, by early March she had cancelled all travel plans and doctor’s appointments, was avoiding restaurants, acquaintances or supermarkets and wore masks and kept her distance on the rare times she ventured out.
“We already knew the disease, the virus, was really lethal, really bad stuff,” said Song, a native of Jiangsu province. “But whenever we got out and saw other people, and people we knew, they would give us this feeling that we were just overreacting.”
In one of many ironies involving the coronavirus, data suggests that Asian-Americans – who have weathered bigotry and attacks as suspected disease carriers – are the least likely to be infected or die from the scourge out of all ethnic groups in the US.
“This kind of xenophobia is never a rational thing, it’s based on stereotypes,” said Merlin Chowkwanyun, a sociomedical professor at Columbia University. “So it’s often not surprising to see that a place that you thought of for a long time to be this kind of cauldron of disease is actually not.”
Available data on Covid-19 infections and mortality in New York City broken down by ethnicity suggests that Asians have the lowest infection and mortality rates of any group, including Caucasians, and often by a significant margin.