San Francisco leaders announced Monday that they would make changes to the emergency shelter at Moscone Center West after 19 people had contact with two former residents of another shelter who contracted the coronavirus.
The 19 residents are being moved into quarantine in hotels, said Mayor London Breed. From now on, the Moscone West facility will be used to house people who have been in quarantine and recovered from COVID-19 or people who have been in quarantine and tested negative.
“Just as the hotel rooms provide an exit for people from hospitals and shelters when someone needs to be quarantined, Moscone West can free up a space in the hotel when they no longer need to be isolated,” Breed said.
Capacity at Moscone West will also be decreased so residents can be spread even farther apart and partitions can be added, she said, though she stressed that the facility already meets Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for providing shelter to those who do not have the virus.
Breed also announced that the city had secured its first hotel lease agreement to provide rooms for first responders, making 383 rooms available, and said she anticipates finalizing a second hotel location this week for an additional 500 rooms. Thirty health care workers moved into hotel rooms over the weekend, Breed said.
The mayor also announced the opening of City Test SF, a drive-through testing site for frontline city workers located at piers 30 and 32, enabling the city to test hundreds of workers a day.
Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the Department of Public Health, said the city’s intensive care hospital bed inventory had been expanded by 91%, from 277 to 530. St. Francis Memorial Hospital has opened a newly dedicated unit for coronavirus patients, which is projected to eventually have a capacity of 48 beds, including eight intensive care beds.
Meanwhile, the state is leading an effort to open 290 beds at the California Pacific Medical Center campus on California Street, which closed last March as patients were moved to the new Van Ness Avenue hospital. That campus had closed last March as patients were moved to the new Van Ness Avenue hospital. The site will need some minor improvements before it’s operational, Breed said, it is anticipated to open within the next 10 days.
Colfax said the city is also planning to release more data about its coronavirus outbreak. His department and the Department of Emergency Management intend to release a new data tracker online that will include demographic information about patients as well as hospitalization and testing data.
As of Monday, the city had 583 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 83 patients in its hospital system and nearly half of those in intensive care. Nine people have died of the disease in San Francisco.
A segment from our radio show, “Civic.” Listen daily at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on 102.5 FM in San Francisco.
