A second person has tested positive for COVID-19 at San Francisco’s Division Circle Navigation Center, a homeless shelter, city officials announced Thursday.
The first positive case was found three weeks ago, and the cases are believed to be unrelated, according to the Department of Emergency Management.
Two weeks ago an outbreak of COVID-19 positive cases was also revealed at the Multi-Service Center South homeless shelter, where 96 guests and 10 staff members have tested positive so far.
Division Circle has a capacity of 186 beds, but the shelter was not full at the time of the first case on April 1, according to city officials. Since then, 48 people have been moved from the navigation center into “isolation, quarantine, and shelter-in-place hotels” according to the Department of Emergency Management.
The remaining 59 people staying at Division Circle will be moved to isolation and quarantine hotel rooms, officials said Thursday.
The Coalition on Homelessness and the Board of Supervisors have pushed Mayor London Breed to move all San Francisco homeless people into hotel rooms for the health of San Franciscans of all stripes. The Board of Supervisors voted earlier this month to approve an ordinance mandating just that, but Breed has characterized it as highly difficult to actually achieve.
City officials said they investigated contacts from the first and second cases at Division Circle, and took other preventative measures in the navigation center, including “deep cleaning” and “symptom screening.”
Once all staying in Division Circle have been placed into other lodgings, the facility will be “temporarily closed,” the department of emergency management said.
As of April 23, city data shows roughly 12,598 people have been tested for the virus in San Francisco with 1,302 confirmed positive cases. Twenty-one people have died from the virus. Of the dead, all except for one were over the age of 60, and had underlying health conditions, the San Francisco Examiner previously reported.
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