The stories are troubling—and sometimes frightening.

In California, a child grabbed a Singaporean woman by her arm and said, “Go back to your country. You are the reason my father died.” In New Jersey, a group of young men stalked a Korean couple pushing their one-year-old granddaughter in a stroller, saying they were all infected with coronavirus. And in the United Kingdom, an eight-year-old girl tells her best friend, who’s Chinese, that her mom won’t let her play with Chinese children anymore because they’re “virus carriers.”

These types of accounts have been on the rise ever since late 2019 outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Between February 9 and March 7, news articles reporting hate incidents against people of Asian descent