“Dear Americans :| Do Not Be Racists Against Asians” reads a drawing by the Brooklyn-based artist Taeyoon Choi which he posted on Instagram on April 2, after, he wrote, he was at the “grocery store and someone was aggressive to me for no reason.” In another post, he depicts someone in a public park yelling at him to “go back to where you came from.” Choi was born in San Mateo, California.

Incidents of racist abuse, violent attacks, and overt prejudice against people of Asian heritage—or those who appear so to others—have soared in the two months that Covid-19 went from being a disease with an initial epicenter in Wuhan to a global pandemic. The United States now has more than triple the number of confirmed cases than China, while Italy and Spain have been the most severely impacted countries in Europe to date. The virus knows no nationalities, but humans have been circulating hatred and bias right along with it. For many of Asian descent, it is a frightening and dangerous time. As the Brooklyn-based artist Bing Lee posted recently: “Fear pairing with anger is deadly.”

Taeyoon Choi is among many who have been chronicling racist incidents against Asians and Asian Americans. On March 8, he posted a sketch with the caption, “Somebody saw me and said ‘ching chang chong.’ Union Square Station, Today, 3.8.20.” He then offered several suggestions on “how to deal with racists.” “Be calm,” he writes, “don’t let the racist win.” Yet Choi acknowledged some hard truths about the prejudices that we all carry: “No one can escape racism because we live in a racist society.”

Since February, people have taken to online platforms to recount their stories using hashtags #Iamnotavirus, #jenesuispasunvirus, #nosoyunvirus, yet the discrimination has only intensified as acts of violence spread with the pandemic’s wave of fear. Based in New Zealand, the Swedish-Korean illustrator Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom has been raising issues about how children of Asian descent are being singled out for bullying or abuse. One of her drawings was inspired by the story of a Caucasian woman asking a 15-year-old Asian girl to get off a tram in Sweden.