They are creating hand out-meals for seniors and have a Fire Chief providing regular Covid-19 updates and information. It’s a tiny corner of the United States that is a peninsula that can be accessed through Tsawwassen~Point Roberts, United States.
It is also a creative place. I have run into Steve Nash on the beach, Margaret Atwood wrote her book “Surfacing” in one of the cottages, and the band Heart composed music there. One of the top sitar makers in the world lives here, and he used to play the sitar with Ravi Shankar.
As Hallie Golden writes in The Guardian Point Roberts’ five square miles houses a population of 1,300. While there are normally 2,000 vehicles crossing into Point Roberts daily, that has trickled down to 100 with the current Covid restrictions.
And they have zero Covid cases.
“Residents can still cross the border for essential travel, including for medical appointments and to pick up prescriptions, but any outsider trying to get into the town would have a tough time getting past border agents.“
With 70 percent of the residents over 60 years of age, the town has a clinic with a nurse and a physician’s assistant. Get really ill in Point Roberts and you are driven 27 miles through two international border crossings to Blaine, Washington State or you use a hospital medivac.
As one resident stated “This is the safest place in probably North America; definitely within the states. You have US Customs coming in and Canadian customs going out. Nothing’s going to happen here or very little.”
This short YouTube video provides a bit of the history of Point Roberts.
Images: PointRobertsNow
Their biggest risk is those 100 cars a day that are still crossing the border. No Point is an Island, to paraphrase a phrase. I hope everyone is taking care.