Racism and Xenophobia in a Pandemic: Interactions of Online and Offline Worlds

History suggests that disease outbreaks have often been accompanied by a rise in xenophobic or racist sentiment.1,2 Such attempts at "othering" reflect misguided efforts to assign social meaning and responsibility to disease, even though illnesses do not recognize socially constructed categories such as race.3 Although systems exist to closely monitor and report on COVID-19 infection and death rates, we currently lack the capacity to monitor racism in response to the pandemic.