The University of California, San Francisco has offered to provide free COVID-19 testing to San Francisco homeless shelter residents, but it’s unclear if or when the city will take the university and medical center up on the offer due to what Mayor London Breed on Sunday described as a shortage of nasal swabs and other testing supplies.
One day earlier, local billionaire Marc Benioff tweeted that four truckloads of personal protective equipment — including 100,000 nasal swabs — had just arrived in the Bay Area, destined for UCSF.
UCSF spokeswoman Kristen Bole confirmed in an email that the hospital planned to test shelter residents. But both Bole and the mayor’s press team said that while the hospital had the lab space required to begin testing shelter residents, staff could not administer tests until they acquired more nasal swabs, a necessary element of a COVID-19 test.
“Since these swabs are different from the FDA-approved swabs we ordinarily use, we are currently testing them to make sure they will work as expected,” UCSF spokeswoman Laura Kurtzman said. We will use them as soon as we know they are safe and effective for use in patients.”
At Multi-Service Center South, the city’s biggest shelter, 125 residents and 51 staff have been tested for coronavirus so far, said Department of Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax. Of those, 81 residents and 10 staff tested positive. San Francisco has nearly 3,000 homeless shelter residents.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen wrote in a Twitter post on Sunday that UCSF had offered COVID-19 tests for every homeless shelter resident in the city, but that the city “HAS NOT taken them up on the offer.” In the post, Ronen called for “a new team of decision makers” to handle the city’s homelessness response during the health crisis.
When asked how many more shelter residents required testing after the recent coronavirus breakout at Multi-Service Center South, Colfax said the city still lacked testing supplies. “We are working with key partners such as UCSF to ensure that we expand our supply,” he said.
A Saturday Twitter post from Benioff, founder and CEO of software giant Salesforce, suggested that he donated 100,000 nasal swabs to UCSF over the weekend.
“Thanks to @UberFreight we currently have 4 semis on the way to UCSF with 750,000 hard to secure units of PPE (500,000 N95 masks, 100,000 isolation gowns, 50,000 face shields and 100,000 nasal swabs)!!,” Benioff’s post reads, paired with pictures of what appear to be crates stacked with boxes inside a semi-truck trailer.
A Salesforce post the same day shows similar pictures of boxes on crates paired with the caption, “Pleased to share that our @UberFreight delivery of PPE including N95s, face shields, and swabs arrived in the Bay Area — its last stop before delivery.”
Benioff could not be reached to confirm whether the swabs had in fact been delivered to the hospital over the weekend. But that did not stop Ronen from doubling down on her Twitter post.
“We have tests, we’re just prioritizing how to use them,” Ronen said. “What matters is that we get every person tested in a homeless shelter and we prioritize their safety as much as people that are housed. I have not seen that in this administration.”
Representatives for the Department of Public Health and the Department of Emergency Management did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
