News

On the anniversary of the pandemic, Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and other public health and infectious disease experts recall when they realized that COVID-19 was going to be trouble. Dr. Kushel said, "Pandemics thrive on inequality, on structural racism, on all the divisions that we have."

Hemal Kanzaria, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and faculty advisor at UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, discussed findings of a new UCSF study describing how the hotel isolation and quarantine strategy used for homeless residents of San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic benefitted the entire community.

Maria Raven, MD, Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a faculty advisor at BHHI, was quoted in this piece describing how hotels leased during the pandemic to prevent the spread of coronavirus provided shelter for unhoused people at risk of severe COVID-19. Dr. Raven said, "When someone is sick and vulnerable, let's get them housed and keep them housed."

Researchers from UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative and the San Francisco Department of Public Health found that housing homeless residents with mild to moderate COVID-19 in hotel rooms lowered the burden on hospitals overwhelmed with more seriously ill patients. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, underscore the public health benefits of providing stable housing and services to those who need them most.

A new study from authors at the San Francisco Department of Public Health the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative showed that San Francisco’s early use of isolation and quarantine hotels for unhoused residents who showed symptoms of or had been exposed to Covid-19 may have significantly freed up hospital capacity and prevented transmission.

Graham Pruss, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, spoke about the rapid growth of vehicle residency over the last decade, especially during the pandemic. Many people without permanent homes are turning to cars, vans, RVs, and campers as a form of affordable housing instead of shelters or encampments, but parking restrictions and lack of infrastructure remain challenges.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying she hopes the city continues to focus on more permanent solutions to homelessness, such as housing vouchers and rent subsidies, over group shelters.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was interviewed for a New York Times article about how rates of COVID-19 among unhoused people remained lower than feared in 2020, as mitigation measures such as providing hotel rooms for the most vulnerable people and closing crowded shelters helped suppress infection rates.

Graham Pruss, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was interviewed about a Portland, OR, vehicular campsite in a year that saw a self-made community confront its disaffiliation from the rest of society. “Vehicle residency is the biggest problem in America that no one’s talking about,” said Pruss.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News discussing rollout of COVID vaccines for people experiencing homelessness. The Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative team recently surveyed unhoused people in Oakland and San Francisco and found they were more likely than the general population to want the vaccine.