Even as San Francisco has been praised in the national press as a model for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, dissenting voices within the city have continued to raise the alarm on what they see as a slow moving catastrophe taking place within the city’s most vulnerable communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe City That Flattened the Coronavirus Curve,\u201d gushed the headline in an Atlantic<\/em> piece praising Mayor London Breed’s leadership during the crisis. But local critics have pointed to outbreaks in shelters and residential hotels as evidence that the city’s reluctance to take more aggressive action risks setting off a time bomb amongst the unhoused population. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The most glaring example so far has been the outbreak at MSC-South, northern California’s largest such facility, which advocates say the Mayor should have prevented by moving to house the entire homeless population in unused hotel rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On April 30, several activists\u2014including the Do No Harm Coalition, Public Health Justice Collective, Faith in Action, and Solidarity Forever Collective\u2014held a \u201cdie-in\u201d in front of the Mayor\u2019s home, protesting Breed\u2019s continued refusal to shelter the city\u2019s unhoused population in vacant hotels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI am just about to embark in the world, into the workforce as a doctor for the first time. I cannot stand by as our city leaders blatantly ignore legislation that is not only essential to preserving public health, but actively doing great harm,\u201d said Olivia Park, a member of Do No Harm coalition and medical Student at UCSF. \u201cIt is a medical necessity that hotel rooms be offered to everyone experiencing homeless. If the COVID-19 pandemic is still such a threat that the shelter-in-place order needed to be extended for housed people, why is it not a threat to our unhoused neighbors?\u201d If anything, we should offer greater protections for our homeless community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weeks earlier, activists held another action on April 13, taking to the streets in a caravan of vehicles, demanding that the Mayor and the involved city agencies take action. Cars adorned with tents and banners, the group honked and chanted as they snaked through the quarantine-emptied streets of South of Market, past the Moscone West Convention Center before crossing Market into the Tenderloin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n