UCSF Study: Economics Played Role In San Francisco Mission District COVID-19 Cases
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- A mass COVID-19 testing program targeting San Francisco's Mission District, among the city's hardest hit neighborhoods by the virus, has found that economics played a role in the spread of the disease, according to UC San Francisco researchers.
UCSF infectious disease specialists teamed up with community organizers from the Latino Task Force for COVID-19 to test 3,953 neighborhood residents from April 25–28. The program administered both nasal swab and antibody tests and the results were peer reviewed by other researchers.
The final results of the walk-up and home-bound testing was released on Thursday.
"We find that recent infections in late April were concentrated almost exclusively among low-income Latinx people working frontline jobs, whereas infections earlier in the pandemic affected people more equally across the ethnic and economic spectrum," said the study principal investigator Dr. Diane Havlir. "This suggests health effects of ethnic and socioeconomic inequities in the community increased during San Francisco's shelter-in-place ordnance and helps explain why Latinx people have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic."
The swab tests found that 2.1 percent of participants were actively infected with the COVID-19 virus at the time of testing in late April. Among those who tested positive, infection rates were nearly 20-fold higher in Latinx than non-Latinx participants and 3.5 times higher for non-resident workers than for Mission residents.
Based on antibody test results, the study team estimates that 6.1 percent of the Mission residents had been infected at some point since the start of the pandemic.
"Although San Francisco's early shelter-in-place order surely prevented the overwhelming numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that were seen in other parts of the country, the disproportionate effects on communities of color are similar to those we see elsewhere," said Jon Jacobo, a leader of the Latino Task Force for COVID-19.
The study data highlighted the importance of economic factors, such as financial insecurity and skyrocketing rental costs in the city, in driving high rates of COVID-19 transmission, for which the Latinx community has been wrongly stigmatized.
"Pandemics exploit the existing inequities in society, putting a larger health and economic burden on communities who already face structural disadvantages such as income inequality, crowded housing conditions, systemic racism and discrimination," said Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco Director of Health.