The Hongcouver | China virus? North America’s most Chinese city is one of the most coronavirus-free places on the continent
- Richmond in British Columbia is just 30km (19 miles) from the US border – but its pandemic performance might as well be on a different planet
- The city’s coronavirus case rate is about a quarter that of Canada as a whole, and just 5 per cent that of the US
Greetings American friends, from Richmond, British Columbia, aka The Most Chinese City in North America™!
Regular readers of the Hongcouver blog will be familiar with this remarkable Canadian community, the only city outside Asia that has a majority ethnic Chinese population, representing 53 per cent of its population, according to the 2016 census.
To put that in perspective, San Francisco – widely regarded as the most Chinese city in the US (various communities within Los Angeles County notwithstanding) – is about 21 per cent Chinese.
Richmond is a fascinating place for any number of reasons – its food scene, a wild real estate market and incongruous tax statistics, to name a few. But as the US continues to grapple with notions about the “China virus” and the value of masks and other measures in the battle against Covid-19, it is worth focusing on Richmond’s stellar performance in the pandemic fight.
The US, with a Covid infection rate of about 2,000 per 100,000 population, can be forgiven for looking north with envy, where Canada as a whole has a rate of just 370. That is a tribute to a much stronger buy-in to pandemic mitigation by the Canadian public and a relative absence of the politicisation and widespread idiocy that has marred the American response (more on that later).
