When I first started this article it was a report on the discrimination Asian-Americans faced due to the coronavirus outbreak. However, as time elapsed, the story and the narrative of the coronavirus has changed. Instead of it being an epidemic in China, it had traveled across the seas and plagued nearly every country in the world, evolving into a pandemic. Since the coronavirus, the entire world has changed. Everything in the world was halted and society was forced to evaluate how to move forward in an economically and socially acceptable way. Along with the major changes in the way that the world works, this pandemic and the mandatory lockdown allowed Americans to reflect on social injustices and find ways to correct them. Movements like Black Lives Matter gained traction that I believe it never would have gotten without the coronavirus pandemic. But I’m not complaining!

At the beginning of the outbreak, everyone in America held some sort of stigma toward Asian-Americans, whether blatant or secret, due to the virus’s origin in China . People didn’t even contain their stigma to just Chinese-Americans; they broadened their spectrum of hate to the entire Asian community. On every social media platform, you would see “funny” videos of men and women alike harassing elderly Asian-Americans with Lysol because they had the “virus.” They used Asian-Americans as a means to deflect their fear of the virus evolving. This, in the end, created outrage in the Asian-American community because they were being oppressed for something they had no control over. Everything changed when the case count in America began to rise exponentially. 

The government and the American people alike believed that the coronavirus outbreak could never reach America. Government officials, like former President Donald Trump, called the coronavirus the “China Virus,” thereby placing the blame on China and refusing to admit that this is a human disease and not a Chinese disease. In March, when cases began to rise exponentially, the government finally decided to take action. This integral piece to the coronavirus pandemic, in my opinion, was handled horribly, and Mr. Trump is entirely to blame. In every major step the United States took to getting back to “normalcy,” Trump tried to assert the dominance he didn’t have. He and his cabinet were so busy downplaying the virus and denouncing the effectiveness of face masks, that he caused the deaths of millions of Americans.

Every step of the way with the Coronavirus has been a challenge and still is. There was never an established way to handle it largely because people alive today have never had to deal with something of this caliber as a nation. There were people who were scared to the brink of paranoia and others who were indifferent. Because of our ongoing bipartisanship, there is never any consensus in America, and this is our main problem as a seemingly “united” nation. People believe what they want to believe and refuse to take heed when presented with facts and statistics. Our 2020 leaders and authority figures had refused to accept the science, and look where that has gotten us: the coronavirus has completely ruptured the seams of the “United” States of America. 

One might even say that the coronavirus has single handedly almost destroyed “the greatest nation in the world.” Although this nation desperately needs to be rebooted economically, socially, and physically, the coronavirus took charge again this month. Fortunately, with both a vaccine and President-Elect Joe Biden on the way to America’s rescue, we will see increased social justice and economic prosperity in our nation very soon.