In an interview with Spanish-language BBC News Mundo (part of the BBC World Service’s foreign language offerings), Dr. Winnie Yip discusses the impact personal actions can have on broader social well-being and explores differences in the attitudes seen across the United States and Asia in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Dr. Yip was in Hong Kong in January when information about COVID-19 began to spread and noticed that media outlets began raising the possibility that the outbreak would be similar to SARS. Though people paid attention to the news with varying degrees of intensity, people wearing masks started to become a more common phenomenon on the street. She believes Asia’s experience with SARS in 2003 influence how people reacted to news of the epidemic. In the BBC interview, Dr. Yip also reflects on the spirit of community and solidarity that seemed to emerge as a result of the coronavirus.
Masks Against the Coronavirus (Prof. Winnie Yip interviewed by BBC News)
