FEBRUARY 5 — As I write this on the day of Li Chun, the first day of Spring of the Chinese solar calendar, it strikes me how as the year turns, so did China's fortunes.

Spring is often heralded as a season of renewal, for new beginnings and for your luck to change.

As the Chinese New Year celebrations began, so did the uptick in the novel coronaviruses infections begin as did the rampant rumour-mongering.

Despite the World Health Organisation stating that travel bans are unnecessary we still see Malaysians clamouring for the entry points to be sealed against any visitor from China.

Just a few weeks ago the tourism industry and operators were all excited to receive the cash cow that is Chinese tourism.

The talk on social media about China and the Chinese people is dehumanising; reducing them to nothing but disease vectors.

I wish I could show them all the video of a mother weeping at the border of a Hubei checkpoint, pleading for her daughter to be let through.

The hospitals where they lived were too crowded and unable to give her cancer-stricken daughter the chemotherapy she needed.

While that mother and daughter did eventually make it to a hospital, another father was not so lucky.

Being stuck in quarantine he was unable to make it home to care for his severely disabled son and despite calls to the authorities, his son ate only a few times and eventually died from starvation.

There are even stories of a family who came from Wuhan but were in another Chinese city and ended up being locked up in their own house.

Apparently there are even bounties being given out for reports of anyone from Wuhan in other areas.

There is nothing right about the inhumane treatment of people who did not ask to be sick in the first place.

Despite all those irresponsible reports by some media depicting Chinese eating bats and blaming the virus on their eating wildlife, a lot of that is still speculation.

I wish Malaysians would remember that they are not the centre of the universe; that outside our borders there are real people, with families, with fears and hopes. People who do not deserve our derision, but our aid.

Perhaps the wave of arrests will at least calm the hysteria to a certain extent as in the past week it's been obvious that infections in Malaysia have been minimal at best with no Malaysians dying from the virus.

I also commend our government for its humane approach in repatriating not just our citizens in Wuhan but non-citizen family members.

Other foreign nationals were not as lucky — given the cruel choice between flying home to safety and abandoning their family or taking their chances by staying behind.

My only wish for the new Chinese lunar year is that Malaysians learn to be calmer in the face of an emergency and that our government will also step up as ably during natural disasters, as it has during this global health crisis.

In the meantime, Malaysians, please keep washing your hands.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.