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Sunshine Board May Return to Keeping an Eye on City Hall

One of the key panels maintaining local government accountability will ­­­­­soon get back to work after being sidelined for months if the head of the Board of Supervisors gets his way. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has not met since Mayor London Breed suspended most public meetings in mid-March, but board President Norman Yee aims to change that.

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Homeless Activists’ Latest Tactic: Occupying Hotel Rooms

Seven protesters from Poor Magazine, a publication and activist organization, attempted to occupy the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown San Francisco on Monday morning to demand that the city house more homeless residents in the thousands of hotel rooms left vacant during the coronavirus pandemic.

Coronavirus testing in the Mission District on April 27, 2020. Barbara Ries / UCSF

Testing in Mission Shows Virus Hits Workers, Latinos at High Levels

A Mission District coronavirus testing initiative has shown stark disparities in who has been getting sick — 95% of those who tested positive in this initiative identified as Hispanic or Latinx. Most earned less than $50,000 a year. But evidence of this disparity had been mounting even prior to the testing, when doctors in San Francisco hospitals saw that the majority of the coronavirus patients who needed to be hospitalized were also Latino.

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Mission Coronavirus Tests Reveal Longstanding Inequities

In late April, a coalition of medical, community and government organizations called Unidos en Salud tested nearly 3,000 people in one Mission District census tract for the new coronavirus. Sixty-two of them tested positive, slightly more than 2% of those tested. Among those testing positive, 95% identified as Hispanic or Latinx, though they made up only 44% of those tested.