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Municipal Politics

Why Is Surrey BC’s Hottest COVID Spot? And More Insights into Pandemic Divisions

What new data reveal about the Lower Mainland.

Christopher Cheung 26 May 2021TheTyee.ca

Christopher Cheung reports on urban issues for The Tyee. Follow him on Twitter at @bychrischeung.

Journalists, data users and curious citizens in B.C. trying to make sense of the pandemic are finally getting more data to chew on.

In late April, the provincial government began announcing the names of high-transmission neighbourhoods. Then came leaked reports from health authorities, shared by the Vancouver Sun, showing in more granular detail the virus’s spread — information that hadn’t been shared with the public.

And just last week, in a bid to demonstrate transparency, the BC Centre for Disease Control released the kind of spreadsheet that many have clamoured for, containing cases per capita and testing positivity and vaccination rates down to the neighbourhood level.

Last week, The Tyee combined census data with the most recent hotspot announcements to determine who lives in the harder-hit areas of the Lower Mainland.

We confirmed that blue-collar areas — where residents work in services, factory settings and elsewhere on the frontlines — were hardest hit. Areas with large households were also overrepresented, and the province’s largest South Asian communities were all, and still are, hotspots.

There were a few other storylines that didn’t make it into that piece. Neither did the vaccination data, which was also quietly released.

So here are more threads of how COVID-19 divides the region.

A reminder from Andy Yan, the director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, when investigating the types of places overrepresented among COVID-19 hotspots: “You could argue that this data might stigmatize certain groups, but they really tell us who we should be helping.”

And even if one particular metric stands out, it’s “multiple marginalities” that lead a place to become a hotspot.


The South Surrey split

Surrey has the largest share of COVID-19 cases in B.C. compared to any other city. It had 29 per cent of the cases between May 11 to 17, despite being home to only 10 per cent of B.C.’s population.

Vancouver, which comes in second, has 15 per cent of province’s cases, about the same as its share of B.C.’s population.

Hotspots are announced based on the province’s Community Health Service Areas, which range from neighbourhoods to small cities. Eight of nine Surrey areas have been identified as hotspots in the past month. The one standout that isn’t a hotspot: South Surrey.

851px version of Surrey-Hotspot-May6.jpg

While Surrey on the whole is a majority working-class place, with a large immigrant population, South Surrey is less so.

In South Surrey, the median household income is about $85,700. In the rest of Surrey, it ranges from about $57,700 in North Surrey to $94,660 in Panorama.

* Surrey hotspots include the areas of North Surrey, Whalley, Guildford, Fleetwood, West Newton, East Newton, Panorama and Cloverdale as announced on May 6. ‘Blue collar’ refers to jobs in sales and services, trades and transport, resources and production and manufacturing and utilities. Graph by Christopher Cheung.

These aren’t the only lines that divide South Surrey and the rest.

South Surrey and Cloverdale have the city’s highest percentage of vaccinated adults at 57 per cent, according to data from the week of May 4. However South Surrey has the city’s fewest cases per capita and the lowest percentage of testing positivity for COVID-19, at six per cent. (This was first reported by the Vancouver Sun.)

Case rates and testing positivity data from May 6 to 10. Vaccination coverage data from May 10. Graph by Christopher Cheung, data via BCCDC.

It’s a huge imbalance considering that South Surrey shares the city with West Newton, the hardest hit area in B.C., where 24 per cent of people tested that week were found positive for the virus.


A tale of two Vancouvers

This map of Vancouver hotspots shows that the city’s east and south sides are hardest hit by the virus, areas known for their working-class immigrant populations.

851px version of Vancouver-Hotspot-May6.jpg

We graphed the demographic makeup of Vancouver’s hotspots versus the makeup of the rest of the city to show the divides.

We can see that blue-collar workers and visible minorities are indeed overrepresented among Vancouver’s hotspots. Interestingly, hotspots have a lower share of renters than the rest of the city, likely because they have smaller household makeups.

* Vancouver hotspots as of May 6 are: Cedar Cottage, Grandview Woodland, Hastings Sunrise, Killarney, Kensington, Renfrew-Collingwood, Sunset and Victoria-Fraserview. Graph by Christopher Cheung. Demographic data from the 2016 census.

Richmond and the ‘model minority myth’

Richmond doesn’t have a single hotspot — an anomaly considering that nearby cities of its size like Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey and Abbotsford all do.

Those familiar with Richmond know that one of its defining characteristics is its large Chinese population, which spiked with immigration beginning in the 1980s. The city’s Blundell and Richmond City Centre areas are the most Chinese places in the province, with two in three people identifying as such.

Some of these residents experienced the SARS epidemic in East Asia firsthand or through loved ones, and so many of them had already began wearing masks, physically distancing and avoiding public places in January 2020, before COVID-19 was declared in emergency in Canada.

Health experts like a University of Manitoba virologist have said this early action need to be “applauded and recognized.”

But this explanation doesn’t tell the full picture and runs into the danger of promoting a “model minority myth,” says Yan.

Blue-collar, in-person work has been a defining quality of Lower Mainland hotspots, and Richmond contains a high percentage of white-collar workers.

Downtown Vancouver may have the region’s highest percentage of working residents in business, finance and administration at 20.7, but in close second is Richmond City Centre, at 20.3 per cent. Other Richmond areas follow close behind, rivalling parts of Vancouver’s west side and West Vancouver.

Other areas with large Chinese populations but are more blue collar — Victoria-Fraserview (54 per cent Chinese) and Renfrew-Collingwood (45 per cent Chinese) in Vancouver — are hotspots.  [Tyee]

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