Page - 395 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

395Spread of Anti-Asian Racism: Prevention and Critical Race Analysis in Pandemic Planning disease is an important strategy in controlling transmission.1 As public health researchers have stated, “Persons who are feared and stigmatized may delay seeking care and remain in the community undetected.”2 The experiences of Asian Canadians in the COVID-19 outbreak have brought into sharp focus the differentiated risks, vulnerability, and marginalization of racialized persons, both generally and in a health crisis. Before implementing measures to control the spread of emerging infectious diseases, public health officials must contemplate how those responses may be experienced differently by racialized persons. Part of this evaluation includes considering how law, policy, and discourse may racialize a disease and conversely, how people may be “treated as pathogens.”3 Further, in seeking to address public fear about the spread of disease, decision makers should evaluate to what extent strategies address the aim of reducing transmission or appease and/or promote public perceptions (sometimes racist percep- tions) of how diseases spread. This chapter provides a preliminary account of the racism expe- rienced by Asian Canadians and calls for a robust race-based analysis of public health measures. While this chapter focuses on the partial border closure as a case study, I invite others to apply a critical race analysis to Canada’s other responses to the pandemic. The selective but simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of per- sons at the border has constructed social ideas of a foreign or Asian virus and affected how Canadians perceive the spread of the virus and the valid ways to limit its transmission. The federal government’s border measures “selectively include” some persons, including tem- porary foreign workers to work in essential services, while “selec- tively excluding” others. This chapter posits that this partial border closure somewhat serves to pacify the wider public’s fears and anxi- ety regarding Asian people as vectors of the virus, and raises ques- tions about not only the efficacy of border restrictions but how it may perpetuate racist discourse in Canada. It is too early to fully assess the extent to which border restric- tions were and are effective in stemming the spread of COVID-19. 1. Bobbie Person et al, “Fear and Stigma: The Epidemic within the SARS Outbreak” (2004) 10:2 Emerging Infections Diseases 358 at 358 [Person et al]. 2. Ibid. 3. Gerald Chan, “The Virus of Anti-Asian Prejudice”, The Star (13 April 2020), online: <www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/04/13/the-virus-of-anti-asian- prejudice.html>.