Since the second week in March, I have been working with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to screen homeless people for signs and symptoms of COVID-19, helping with case investigation, isolation and quarantine and setting up a team of nurses and doctors to provide care for homeless people placed in hotels. Thankfully, very few homeless people have become severely ill from COVID-19. Looking back on the past 6 weeks, it has been a whirlwind of activity with many great ideas that have turned out to be not very useful (e.g. screening everyone for elevated temperature in the shelters) and other ideas that I wish we had accomplished (like universal PCR testing of homeless people in a shelter after our first positive case at the end of March). This virus has served up a large piece of humble pie! It has been wonderful to reconnect with the dedicated and courageous staff of San Francisco's Healthcare for the Homeless led by Barry Zevin and Kate Murphy and to get to know a group of skilled NPs and doctors from ZSFGH who have been assigned to our team. This week we hope to have FCM residents join faculty member Juliana Morris and me on our care team as we open another shelter-in-place hotel. Lastly, I have been working with a group of dedicated and brilliant first year medical students who built an app with folks from Salesforce. This app has been super helpful in collecting real time data on our services in the shelters and hotels. I am so grateful to these students, John Kim and Rose Kish from Salesforce as well as Kevin Grumbach and Anthony Ababon who helped support this work.
Joshua Bamberger, MD, MPH (he/him)
Professor, Family and Community Medicine, UCSF