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A chat with Lex The Lexicon Artist about her new album Alter Ego, branching into influential anime, the state of being a Chinese-American artist during the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic, and also deez nuts. A version of this interview originally appeared at Melancholyball. Dom/NOC: Hi there. Please introduce yourself, for those who may be unfamiliar or would […]

Dominic and Keith are still talking about how COVID-19 is changing the nerd pop landscape. This week, what will “normal” even look like? http://traffic.libsyn.com/thenerdsofcolor/HNL188.mp3 Up first, they talk about watching Star Trek, both Discovery and Picard and why Dom really digs the former and Keith was disappointed with the latter. Then they switch topics to coronavirus (of course) and […]

In last night’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill Maher used his “New Rules” segment to go after the politically correct naming battle around COVID-19 and the coronavirus. The virus has been frequently referred to as the Chinese or Wuhan virus, based on its geographic origin.

Maher goes on a rant about how we’ve always named viruses after their places or origin saying, “Scientists, who are generally pretty liberal, have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time … Zika is from the Zika forest; Ebola from the Ebola river. Hantavirus from the Hantan river. There is the West Nile virus and Guinea Worm and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and of course, the Spanish flu. MERS stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, it’s plastered all over airports and no one blogs about it.”

But many people, like California Congressman Ted Lieu, are urging the public not to use those names for the virus, as they have inflamed racism and hate towards Asian people worldwide and Asian-American people here at home.

One reason @POTUS & his enablers failed to contain #COVID2019 is due to the myopic focus on China. The virus was also carried into the US from other countries & US travelers. Calling it Chinese coronavirus is scientifically wrong & as stupid as calling it the Italian coronavirus. https://t.co/T5SPlSaKaA

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 10, 2020

Maher’s straw man argument is essentially this: that overly PC liberals are ignoring the facts of the virus in favor of not hurting anyone’s feelings. And in doing so, we are letting China off the hook, and they will continue to run wet markets and sell exotic meats that scientists the world over agree are a breeding ground for these kinds of diseases.

Should global powers put pressure on China to close (or at least regulate) these markets? Of course, and they already have. The UN’s biodiversity chief has already called for a ban on these markets, but there are larger economic issues at play.

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, released a statement saying

“It would be good to ban the live animal markets as China has done and some countries. But we should also remember you have communities, particularly from low-income rural areas, particularly in Africa, which are dependent on wild animals to sustain the livelihoods of millions of people … So unless we get alternatives for these communities, there might be a danger of opening up illegal trade in wild animals which currently is already leading us to the brink of extinction for some species. We need to look at how we balance that and really close the hole of illegal trade in the future.”

Additionally, the Chinese dictatorship should be held accountable for downplaying the outbreak and silencing scientists.

But doggedly insisting on calling it the “Chinese virus” accomplishes neither of these tasks. It only inflames racism and xenophobia at a time when those issues are already running rampant in society. Maher claims that American can hold two ideas in their head: that we can choose to not be racist while acknowledging the virus’s geographical origins.

But we can also hold these two ideas separately in our head: that we can demand justice and change in China’s wet markets while at the same time not vilifying folks of Asian descent and fueling ignorance and racism. Even HHS head Alex Azar agrees, saying “You’re absolutely right. We must ensure nobody is discriminated against based on ethnicity, … Ethnicity is not what causes the novel coronavirus.”

It’s not overt political correctness to want to protect our Asian-American citizens from racism and hate. Especially at a time when our country is lead by a racist and xenophobic president. This is a public safety issue as well. We’re in dire need of empathy and compassion now more than ever.

(via The Hollywood Reporter, image: screencap/HBO)

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Due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, there has been a series of “repatriation flights,” which are flights organized by the U.S. Department of State (in the case of America) to bring citizens stranded in other countries back home. This is done where there are no commercial flights due to borders being closed. However, some Americans are noticing, according to NPR, varying levels of health screenings at U.S. airports, not all of them equally rigorous.

Dan Honig, for example, was one of some 150 passengers who were brought back to the States from Senegal, on a repatriation flight that landed in Washington Dulles International Airport on April 3. He observed that, while the group took protective measures during the flight, which was staffed by medical workers in hazmat suits, the group didn’t go through a final health screening as they disembarked, went home, or went to other domestic flights.

“I expected that my temperature would probably be taken, as it had been when boarding the flight,” says Honig, yet that didn’t take place because Honig and the others were traveling from a place on which the U.S. hasn’t placed travel restrictions. Right now, Customs and Border Protection says that when international flights from China, Iran, the U.K., and the European Union come in, they are taken in groups of 50 in order to test for COVID-19.

“I didn’t know if we would be given self-quarantine orders,” Honig said, “but I thought, at the very least, we would be kind of recommended to do so.”

When NPR asked Customs and Border Protection about Honig’s experience, seeking clarity, the response from a spokesperson said the agency is “following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Considering we have seen the government struggle with resources and knowing how to communicate facts to the American public, I’m not surprised they are trying to be frugal with this, but considering that all air travel has potential risks and most people are asymptomatic, it does seem reckless—especially for those who have seen what happens in other countries.

People began responding to Hoing’s tweets and sharing their experiences of returning to the U.S. through commercial flights and their experiences in other countries:

I arrived in America April 3 on a State Department medical evacuation flight. No medical check; no data collection; no instructions. A very critical month later, and the US still seems to be behind where Senegal had been a month prior on systems/policies. 20/

— Dan Honig (@rambletastic) April 7, 2020

Same thing. We arrived from Cambodia on April 2nd. No checks, questionnaires or anything else. The US “response” is a joke and if it’s wasn’t so serious it would be a comedy. For the so-called greatest country on earth what an embarrassment.

— Phil Butterworth (@ChopperPhil) April 8, 2020

Over the next 14 days, as I continue to quarantine, I’ll share my first-hand experience of how the South Korean government is thinking out of the box to fight the COVID-19. I hope the rest of the world will observe, learn and step up to fight this global pandemic together /4

— Heidi Shin (@heidishin) April 8, 2020

It is alarming how, despite the hard-working people in the medical field attempting to help, there are still a lot of potential holes in the system.

(via NPR, image: Skitterphoto from Pexels)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—