Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

MUMBAI, INDIA—One day at the end of April, dentist Azmera Shaikh tested positive for the novel coronavirus. That afternoon, feeling feverish and achy, she and her mother, who had also tested positive, descended from their apartment here to board an ambulance to the hospital. They were startled to find a dozen or so neighbors lined up with mobile phones in hand. Pictures and videos of their departure soon circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook. “We were entertainment,” Shaikh says. “We were the joke of the town.”

A volunteer with the nonprofit Doctors for You, Shaikh had seen the fear and distrust brought by the pandemic while working in the slums of eastern Mumbai. Some areas had not allowed her team to set up screening camps for fear that residents would be assumed infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But she didn’t expect her educated, middle-class neighbors to behave similarly.

Soon, her entire family was in quarantine. The rules made it difficult for her father and brother to put out garbage and get groceries. Yet neighbors did not help. Their attitude, Shaikh says, was “more traumatizing than the illness itself.”

As the coronavirus spread early this year, people around the world responded in similar ways. In Nepal, health care workers were thrown out of rental apartments. In Haiti, hospitals treating COVID-19 patients were attacked. In the United States, many people avoided East Asian–dominated neighborhoods, linking the virus with people from China, where the outbreak began. Read more via Science Magazine