1 in 3 of the population of Vancouver are of South East Asian origin (primarily Hong Kong and China), that is the figure I heard when I lived in Vancouver.

Is this figure correct?

I also noticed three other things in Vancouver (this was ~10 years ago)

a) That ethnically South East Asian people are not very visible, so seem to stay indoors way more than non South East Asian people and not socialize much in public relatively speaking.

b) That ~50% of Caucasian women have red or ginger hair!

c) There are more salad bars per capita than anywhere else in the world!

https://lunarmobiscuit.com/pandemic-...ext-up-africa/


Not looking good

Wikipedia says "Almost 30%". I knew Vancouver was very cosmopolitan, but I had no idea it had quite so many people with Chinese heritage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver#Demographics

Thanks for confirming. Probably a bit lazy of me not to Wiki / Google it!

It's due to what Boba mentioned, the large number of Pacific route flights.

My brother who lived there for 12 years also told me that a lot of wealthy Hong Kong and Chinese nationals were buying up a lot of the property there as investments (there has been a massive building programme of high rise apartment and office buildings there over the last ~20 years) and that this same group were sending their children to study at universities in Vancouver / BC.

As I mentioned, I saw hardly any South East Asian people in public when I was there. The main time I did see any was if they were working in outdoor food markets, but that's about it. Plus office workers entering and exiting their office buildings, but not in any social settings.

Could be partly selective or exaggerated memory on my part so maybe some current Vancouver residents can confirm this?

If it is the case then it will obviously lessen the spread of the virus for pre-existing cultural behavioural reasons.

A friend of mine is stranded in Goa at the moment. The lockdown there is fierce. The police are beating anyone not complying.

You gotta think too that once some casinos reopen the poker rooms might still be closed. I could easily see that happening, as the casinos prioritize limited table gaming and slots. Poker isn't really a money maker for any of them and it's definitely more of a challenge to implement social distancing there. I could be wrong but it wouldn't surprise me that when casinos open it will be awhile before we see poker.

On my delivery routes you hardly ever see the customers with chinese names. I think most of their houses are vacant.

^ yeh before the gov limited foreign investments wealthy chinese were buying property anywhere they could.

few communities in ca that are like 30% empty houses for the same reason

Sounds like some Coronavirus run good for Vancouver, for its residents and its US poker playing residents. A lot of South East Asian people "officially" there, but many only on paper, and of the remainder a lot are not instinctively big outdoor socializers. And of the remainder of the remainder!, the rest are wearing masks!

Also not mentioned, but obvious, is that Vancouver is a very wide open spaces place, clearly if you go just a short distance outside the centre, but very spacious in the centre too, certainly compared to many other major cities in the world.

A recent japanese study shows that small flugge droplets coming from sneezes, loud talking and cough can remain suspended in the air up to 20 minutes thus virtually infecting everyone staying in indoor and poor ventilated spaces.

Other studies suspect that coronavirus tend to be trapped by air pollutant particles, that's a possible reason why high polluted areas are hit more severely (Wuhan, Madrid, Northern part of Italy, N.Y.C., etc)

As usual some accurate takes early in 2+2 threads

I don't think you are wrong at all. Nobody knows how long the "awhile" is but Id be surprised if many (any?) rooms open same time as casino. Complexity in safely opening various gaming floors.

Slots: Easy
Table Games : Moderate
Poker: Impossible

It will be interesting to see how CA Card Clubs handle this when they are allowed to reopen. Obv poker is big part of their business and owners will approach much differently than a Casino Exec with slots and normal table games.

The other reason is the players don't touch cards on most table games and the odds of player to player transmission is lower. It's easier with disposable gloves to protect players and dealers in blackjack as opposed to poker (even if poker was capped to five handed.

I'm asking if you would ever enter a casino after knowing that every single soul being there is proved to be recently negative tested for COVID-19.

casinos are the most dangerous places to visit right now(all closed anyways) or in the next 3 to 4 months if it comes to convid-19

Vancouver is the most 'Asian' city outside Asia

I think you're confusing a correlation for a causation here. Or perhaps even have it flipped - the high Asian population is part of the reason we have so many flights. That, and our close proximity to China. A significant Chinese population existed in Vancouver (and BC) prior to its incorporation in 1886. Lots of growth in that number since WWII. Wiki's not a top-notch historical site, but this gives a good background if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chines...ater_Vancouver

I don't think this is accurate. Like any place with high immigration, the first generation or two often tend to move into the same areas, so that ethnic population is going to skew to different regions, and your perception can be very different depending on where you spend your time here. I mean, I've never studied ethnic indoor/outdoor patterns so I can't say there's not some distinctions, but I highly doubt they're strong enough to say they generally "stay indoors way more" - especially when we get past the first generation.

If you had spent any time in Richmond (city bordering to the south), for example, you'd come to the opposite conclusion - that the white people mostly stay in their houses.

Back more to the subject at hand.

There is unquestionably an issue with overseas investment and money laundering driving up real estate prices, but that doesn't have a significant number on the South Asian numbers being reported. However, you have a good point with regard to less crowding - Vancouver's pretty small relative to most of the other major cities Arty brought up.

Also, I think our health authorities are really on top of things here; at least it seems that way so far. Still some ways to go before we know for sure. Of course there may be luck involved as well.

And as I've mentioned before, all of this certainly makes me inclined to lean to the side of the experts who have said that closing borders early doesn't help.

I would tend to agree.

Definitely bad for poker. Poker rooms and the closeness of everybody and the constant touching of the cards? I mean forget about it, it's infection heaven. I'm definitely craving a nice 5-10 NL don't get me wrong but the casinos would have to be idiots to open the poker rooms anytime soon.

Yeah the California card clubs might be the exception regarding reopening the poker tables. I would hope if they do they offer very few games spread out all over the room with 3 players max at each table. But who knows what they will do. That's the scary part. You know if they are back to full games sadly those places will be immediately packed.

One of those stats like, as far as I'm aware, the city with the second largest Polish population is Chicago

I've been researching for a while to try and understand why Vancouver has been relatively unscathed, and it seems that although it has a large population of people with Chinese heritage, Canada is not particularly high on the list of popular destinations for Chinese outbound traffic or tourism. (Japan, Thailand and Korea are far and away most popular, followed by France, Malaysia, Italy and the US, although not necessarily in that order - it's hard to find reliable up-to-date stats.)
While I have no doubt that Vancouver had/has many visitors/inhabitants from China (and Canada's first cases - in Toronto and Vancouver - both had recent travel history to Wuhan), there were no direct flights from Wuhan itself to anywhere in Canada. London Heathrow was receiving 3 flights a week from the epicentre of the virus. New York, San Francisco, and Rome were other hubs with direct flights from Wuhan.
That said, the most popular flight destination from Wuhan is Chengdu, and direct flights did go from there to Vancouver, as well as LA and Chicago and all the main European capitals.
From reading the wikipedia timelines it appears that Canada was very good at detecting and isolating suspected "imported" cases very early on, with warnings issued to - and basic screening happening at - three Canadian airports as early as January 17th. When London took action five days later, they had a list of 2000 recent travellers from Wuhan that needed tracing. History does not record how successful that tracing was, but the first confirmed cases in the UK (two people from Wuhan) occurred a further nine days later, by which time community transmission must have occurred in multiple places.

Yep say it's just a mere luck factor.

IMHO I don't think they will be able to open until restaurants and bars open since they have similar densities people together.
Plus they will probably start to allow 10 people together, then 50 and maybe 200. Most of the card clubs would not open until the 200 level hit, and the ones in LA, until 1000+ can be in the same building.


California will also have a much longer curve of the virus, so even tho we have been hit much less than other parts of the nation, we are likely going to open much slower than other places. Those limits on the same number of people congregating will go up much slower.

I don't even understand how restaurants are allowed to do take out at this point...Untested people handling and breathing over food? And then handing it to me to eat? No thanks.....

Picked up pizza a few days ago. All the workers had gloves and masks, and the pizza is baked at high temp so not too worried. Cant say same for fast food burger places.