The need to reach Surrey residents became even more critical as the pandemic worsened. The city has had over 10,000 cases and is part of the hard-hit Fraser Health region.
Surrey is largely a blue-collar immigrant suburb. About 52 per cent of its workers can’t work from home because they do manual labour jobs, according to census data. One-third of residents don’t speak English in their homes. After English, Punjabi is most commonly spoken in Surrey.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, researchers have urged health officials to collect data on how the coronavirus is affecting ethnocultural communities, particularly in diverse places like Surrey with high infection rates.