Coronavirus Pandemic: San Francisco Officials Report New Death, 85 New Confirmed Cases
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Health officials in San Francisco Monday reported a new coronavirus death over the last 24 hours and 85 new confirmed cases among the city's residents.
Officials did not release the latest victim's age, gender, how they may have contracted the disease or where their deaths occurred. The latest fatality raised the number of San Francisco residents who have lost their lives during the current outbreak to 15 and the total number of confirmed cases rose to 957 since the virus was first reported locally.
Of those infected, San Francisco health officials said, 54 percent have acquired the illness by community spread. By gender, 60 percent of the confirmed cases have been in males. When it comes to age, 41 percent of all confirmed cases have been in individuals 18-40. When it came to ethnic groups, 23 percent of the cases have stricken Hispanics/Latinos; 19 percent white, 14 percent Asian-Americans and 5 percent African-Americans.
The biggest concern in the city was a coronavirus outbreak among at least 70 residents at the city's largest homeless shelter.
On Saturday, MSC South looked very much like an emergency medical ward. The sheriff's deputies outside were in full protective gear as some residents, presumably those not infected, were ferried to hotels the city has secured to isolate vulnerable populations.
"We had plans to staff up hotel rooms as rapidly as we possibly can in case an outbreak occurred," Mayor London Breed said Friday.
For weeks, a number of city supervisors and homeless advocates had been pushing for broader use of hotel rooms ahead of such an outbreak. The mayor's has office resisted that approach, using hotel rooms on a more tactical scale, arguing that the city simply does not have the staff for housing the homeless at large and at will.
"If you can't self-care you're still going to come inside somewhere, but we need more care wrapped around you for that to be successful," said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, director of Homelessness & Supportive Housing.
She says filling any room requires assessing the resident for any potential needs, then securing the necessary resources and staffing.
"Staff enough people, everything from monitoring, to security, to medical, to counselor," says Stewart-Kahn.
"Making sure that we can feed people, that we can clean the rooms, and we can do the laundry," added Mayor Breed. "Making sure we can keep the people who we are asking to work in these hotels safe."
"I'm in the business," says Randy Shaw, Director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. "My organization is in the business of housing homeless people out of shelters. And it's not as fast process as many of the supervisors realize. It takes more time."
Shaw says the risk inside shelters isn't at all separated from the situation outside of them, and he points to MSC South as an example. While there was security visible Saturday, on Friday afternoon we saw shelter residents mingling with those living in tents - just beyond the shelter door.
"The people we are talking about are not even able to get in the shelters," Shaw says. "There's no spacing on the streets, and the city doesn't care. When they say that they are allowing tents, that's not true. They are only allowing them in the Tenderloin. So you can't even - literally - walk out of your apartment or hotel in the Tenderloin and be safe outside your front door because there are tents there."
