San Francisco study finds 90% of people who tested positive for coronavirus were still going to work

Ninety percent of people who tested positive for coronavirus in San Francisco’s Mission District were still leaving their homes to go to work, a new study found.  

Researchers from the University of California – San Francisco, launched a broad testing effort in the Mission District last month in hopes of forming a comprehensive picture of how COVID-19 is spreading within the neighborhood.

Results released this week revealed that 2.1 percent of the 4,160 people tested were positive for COVID-19. 

Among the positive individuals, 90 percent had ‘no capability of working from home’, according to lead researcher Dr Diane Havlir, chief of the UCSF Division of HIV, Infection, and Global Disease at San Francisco General. 

‘These were frontline workers, they had to work outside of the home, either that or they were furloughed or unemployed,’ Havlir told KCBS. 

Researchers from UC San Francisco tested 4,160 people in the Mission District between April 25 and 28. The charts above show characteristics among the 62 who tested positive

The testing effort was organized by Unidos En Salud, a partnership between UCSF researchers, Mission community organizers in the Latino Task Force for COVID-19, the City and County of San Francisco, and officials with the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH).

All residents living in a 16-block section of the Mission District – the second-most dense area of the city – were offered free, voluntary tests between April 25 and 28.

Researchers said about half of the people living in that area showed up for testing. 

In total, 62 people tested positive for COVID-19, three quarters of them men. 

Ninety-five percent of the positive individuals were Hispanic or Latinx. 

‘The COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting the Latinx community in San Francisco, both in terms of infection rates and economic hardship,’ Dr Carina Marquez, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, said in a statement. 

‘We have been partnering very closely with the Latino Task Force for COVID-19 to support this community by working to disrupt transmission of the disease.’ 

Researchers from the University of California – San Francisco launched a broad testing effort in the Mission District last month in hopes of forming a comprehensive picture of how COVID-19 is spreading within the neighborhood. A testing site is pictured on April 27

Ninety-five percent of the people who tested positive were Hispanic or Latinx. The pie charts above show the percentage of ethnicities tested (left) versus those who tested positive (right)

More than 80 percent of positive individuals said they had been financially affected by the pandemic, compared with 53 percent of negative individuals. 

When the results were released on Tuesday, city officials announced that all essential workers would be eligible for free COVID-19 testing as part of its ongoing expansion efforts.   

‘This project represents an exponential leap into the next stage of the fight against COVID-19, which is to move from diagnostic testing of people who are ill to broad community-based screening,’ Havlir said. 

‘This is critical to our ability to identify where the virus is still actively spreading and to enable us to act swiftly to get control of this epidemic.

‘We hope this can be a model for future community screening efforts in San Francisco and beyond.’ 

As of Monday, San Francisco County has 1,624 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 29 deaths. 

Nationwide, nearly 1.23 million people have tested positive and at least 71,642 have died.