The coronavirus outbreak is having a devastating effect on a global scale as more than 2 million people have contracted the infectious disease, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO, migrants and refugees face similar health threats from the coronavirus, but “inadequate access to essential services and exclusion may makes early detection, testing, diagnosis, contact tracing and seeking care for COVID-19 difficult for refugees and migrants thus increasing the risk of outbreaks in these population and presenting an additional threat to public health.” This fear that COVID-19 will impact refugee and migrant populations more than other populations is one that exiled Uighurs have for their imprisoned family and friends.

The Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group who have lived in northwest China for centuries. The Uighur minority, who are predominantly Muslim, live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the largest province in China, but one of the least populous and most remote regions. Xinjiang was once the heart of the Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes that connected China and the Far East with the Middle East and Europe.

According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), beginning in 2017, Uighur detainees have been sent to what the Chinese government calls “Vocational Education and Training Centers” where the Uighurs are forced to learn Mandarin and undergo daily political indoctrination. Uighurs who have been released from the “vocational training centers” say that the centers are akin to concentration camps where some detainees say they were tortured. Once the Uighur detainees complete their “vocational training,” they are assigned to work in factories where the conditions are considered to be forced labor, according to the ICIJ. The detainees from the camps who are not sent to work in factories are imprisoned with lengthy jail sentences, according to an article by Voice of America (VOA).  

The New York Times reported that by March 20, more than 200,000 people from predominantly Uighur counties were sent back to work in factories in other parts of China. Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that this move happened at a time when millions of people were still quarantined and companies had ceased production due to fear of the coronavirus.

Families of the incarcerated Uighurs worry that the overcrowded and poorly ventilated holding centers will exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus. Prisons are an ideal environment for the infectious disease as conditions are not conducive to social distancing requirements. Hashtags calling for the indoctrination camps to shut down during the coronavirus outbreak have been gaining popularity on Twitter. Samira Imin, a young Uighur woman living in Boston, reached out to the Twittersphere to raise awareness of the dire situation her people, including her father, are in. Imin created the hashtag campaign #VirusThreatInTheCamps in the hopes that her father, who has been held in an indoctrination camp for two years, would be freed.

Uighur activists call for a complete shutdown of the camps and for the Chinese government to take care of the Uighurs’ and other Xinjiang residents’ basic needs. In a time when the world’s most vulnerable populations are most at risk of contracting COVID-19, extra precautions must be made against a threat that does not discriminate, but disproportionately affects the poor, migrants and refugees, black and Latinx communities, and the elderly.