Normally bustling century-old Chinatowns from Melbourne to San Francisco have fallen quiet and businesses are struggling to survive as fears over the deadly novel coronavirus outbreak ripple around the world.

“Scaremongering is rampant” complains Max Huang, owner of the Juicy Bao restaurant in Melbourne’s historic Chinese district. “Customers won’t come in if they can avoid it.”

Huang’s eatery sits among dozens of restaurants making up Australia’s oldest Chinatown enclave, dating back to the influx of fortune-seekers during an 1850s gold rush.

Although the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic is more than a ten-hour-flight way, and Australia has seen just a handful of cases, the stigma of a disease that has claimed more than 1,800 lives is pervasive.