Homeless in SF = 1%. 20% of Covid-19 in SF = Homeless

This opener was published in The Guardian last Wednesday:

"More than 90 residents and 10 staff members at San Francisco’s largest homeless shelter have tested positive for coronavirus, in a development that homeless advocates say was both predictable and preventable amid massive policy failures. 

The outbreak at the MSC South shelter is believed to be the largest reported outbreak in a single shelter in the country. The spike caused a single 12% surge in positive cases in the city, illustrating the magnitude of the crisis in a region that so far has weathered the coronavirus storm well.

San Francisco reported 957 confirmed Covid-19 cases on Monday, a number that was “significantly higher” than the 797 reported on Friday, said Dr Grant Colfax, the director of the San Francisco department of public health, “in large part due to the large numbers of testing we did in the homeless community.”

There will be more, Colfax said."

“This [outbreak] was totally preventable and totally predictable,” said Chris Herring, a sociology doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley who works with the Coalition on Homelessness.

We're not ones to copy/paste since SF CARES prides on original content but the above was absolutely needed to drive home how our city has utterly failed us. 30,000 hotel rooms are vacant, we're in week six of shelter-in-place. The Board of Supervisors have battled with City Hall for weeks, even fundraising themselves to place the poverty in hotel rooms

And that's why today, 1% of San Franciscans are homeless yet 20% of confirmed Covid-19 cases are within the ones suffering on the streets.

SF CARES is an acronym of Compassion, Advocacy, Resilience and Education Services.

Our focus is solely on the needy, the ones living on sidewalks, the poor, the beggars, the ones without shoes, the ones living in tents (if they're lucky), the ones that never get a break in life. For over a decade we've advocated for the poverty it's incredibly upsetting to see how many more people are now living on the streets, in danger of contamination.

If you want to help, please give to the Board of Supervisors hotels4homeless GoFundMe