In mid-March five years ago, President Donald Trump tweeted about the threat of a “Chinese virus.” That month marked the official beginning of a pandemic that went on longer and took a larger toll in the U.S. — on lives, the economy, mental health and our social fabric — than a naive public could anticipate. And it sparked a wave of anti-Asian racism that rhetoric like Trump’s exacerbated.
Researchers have since quantified many aspects of the pandemic’s impact, from mortality and morbidity to educational gaps and mental health metrics. UC Berkeley professors Khatharya Um and Julian Chun-Chung Chow, however, noticed that those efforts told an incomplete story.
Um, in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Chow, from the School of Social Welfare, center their scholarship on South and Southeast Asian American communities. Existing studies on COVID-19’s impact on Asian American people tended to be overbroad, describing the experiences of a community that comprises over 20 major ethnic groups as a monolith. When studies did look at specific subgroups, they tended to be limited to East Asian people or Filipino health care workers.
But the Asian population in the U.S. includes a wide range of experiences. For instance, 22.1% of Burmese Americans live below the federal poverty line — that’s more than four times the 5.5% poverty rate among Filipino Americans — and Asian Americans’ COVID-19 mortality rates varied based on factors including their state of residence.