San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2020/05/page/3/)
How to best support the thousands of people who are homeless in San Francisco, and prevent the spread of the new coronavirus among them, during this pandemic has been a point of contention for months. San Francisco Public Press reporter Brian Howey has been covering everything from a scuttled initiative to test everyone in the shelter system to how the city would use RVs it had secured for people without housing to self-isolate.
Some nonessential businesses might be able to resume limited operations starting May 18.
Residents struggling to pay for housing due to the coronavirus pandemic have requested more assistance than what is available through City Hall.
A community health survey has identified elevated levels of harmful substances in workers and residents around Hunters Point. The Navy says its toxic and radioactive Superfund site isn’t the source, but experts agree more study is needed.
Under shelter-in-place orders, the Public Press staff has been producing the local current affairs program “Civic” from home, conducting interviews remotely and managing a radio station at a distance.
Seven protesters from Poor Magazine, a publication and activist organization, attempted to occupy the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown San Francisco on Monday morning to demand that the city house more homeless residents in the thousands of hotel rooms left vacant during the coronavirus pandemic.
A Mission District coronavirus testing initiative has shown stark disparities in who has been getting sick — 95% of those who tested positive in this initiative identified as Hispanic or Latinx. Most earned less than $50,000 a year. But evidence of this disparity had been mounting even prior to the testing, when doctors in San Francisco hospitals saw that the majority of the coronavirus patients who needed to be hospitalized were also Latino.
California doled out a record $4.4 billion in jobless benefits last week, more than triple the amount it paid out the previous week, data from the state’s Employment Development Department shows. In the week ending April 25, the state disbursed $1.4 billion in benefit payments.
In late April, a coalition of medical, community and government organizations called Unidos en Salud tested nearly 3,000 people in one Mission District census tract for the new coronavirus. Sixty-two of them tested positive, slightly more than 2% of those tested. Among those testing positive, 95% identified as Hispanic or Latinx, though they made up only 44% of those tested.
In response to an increase in tent encampments in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, city officials will target 13 blocks with outreach, services, cleaning and enforcement. People living in some encampments will be asked to relocate to permitted sites, and the city will open one such site with 50 spaces on Fulton Street between Larkin and Hyde streets.
