**1. Introduction**

The coronavirus disease, which emerged with respiratory symptoms (high fever, cough, shortness of breath) in Wuhan, China's Hubei Province in December 2019, has turned into a worldwide pandemic. The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 13, 2020, spread rapidly in 6 continents and hundreds of countries after China, causing many deaths [1]. At the time of preparation for this study (August 23, 2021), approximately 211,730,035 people worldwide were infected and 4,430,697 people died due to COVID-19 [2]. The COVID-19 outbreak, defined as the first pandemic caused by coronaviruses, has caused global concern. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges. A few of these difficulties are stigma and xenophobia. The stigma associated with COVID-19 has serious implications for the lives of healthcare professionals, patients, and those who have had the disease. This makes a difficult situation, such as the fight against the epidemic, even more difficult. Health workers, infected individuals, and their families are seen as possible sources of infection and are exposed to various discrimination and stigmatization. Not allowing healthcare workers to use public transportation, being asked to vacate their rented houses, being exposed to verbal and physical violence, abandoning the woman with COVID-19 who gave birth by her family, calling the street where the house of a person with COVID-19 is located as a 'corona road' and people avoiding this street are examples of stigma [3]. Epidemics that contain many uncertainties, such as the COVID-19 epidemic, can cause serious social stigma. For example, Russian Jewish immigrants were stigmatized because of the typhus and cholera epidemics in 1892, and Native Americans in the region were stigmatized because of the 1993 hantavirus epidemic in the United States. Also, an epidemic of bubonic plague, the so-called "black death" attributed to rats transported by ship from Hong Kong in the spring of 1900, resulted in discrimination and stigmatization in the San Francisco Chinatown community [4]. Stigmatized persons may give up seeking treatment, people may fear and avoid stigmatized persons, society may be prejudiced against stigmatized persons, and this may turn into verbal or physical violence against stigmatized persons or groups. For fear of being stigmatized and labeled as someone with an infectious disease, many at-risk people may not seek help until symptoms become very severe. In fact, many people may not seek help for treatment at all [5]. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an environment with too many risks for stigma. Xenophobia is a word that means fear and hatred of foreigners [6]. Xenophobia is spreading in many countries during the pandemic and is mostly directed against Asians. Such xenophobic incidents have been reported in countries such as Belgium, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Cases of xenophobia include verbal attacks and accusations of spreading the virus to the public [7]. In this section, it is aimed to discuss the history of the concepts of stigma and xenophobia, its psychosocial dimension, its relationship with the COVID-19 pandemic, methods of combating risk factors in the light of literature information, and to raise awareness about this situation.
