In Paris, a Taiwanese woman complains about people moving away from her on a train because she is wearing a mask. In Hungary, Vietnamese shop owners put up signs saying that they are not Chinese. In South Korea, more than half a million people have petitioned the president to stop Chinese people from entering the country.

This week as the coronavirus that emerged in China spread to more than a dozen countries around the world, there have been instances of racial abuse and discrimination against people of Chinese citizenship and descent as well as those of other east or south-east Asian heritages.

Such prejudice echoes historical episodes of blaming ethnic groups for disease outbreaks and plays to contemporary geopolitical friction between Beijing and other capitals, in areas from 5G mobile to trade, said Jo?o Rangel de Almeida, a member of the epidemic response group at the Wellcome Trust, the London-based medical charity. “Diseases are a great tool to magnify social trends and tensions,” he said. “A catalytic force like an outbreak brings forth all this discourse. We see this fear and this panic generates an enormous need to pinpoint scapegoats,” he said, pointing to the discrimination against San Francisco’s Chinese community during an early 1900s plague outbreak.