Just after 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, nearly 100 people gathered at 701 Alabama St., forming a large circle, slowly turning to the south, west, north and east as directed. Some placed their hands on either side of their bodies and spread them toward the sky.
Thursday, on the last day of the community hub’s Covid-19 services, its founders, doctors and community workers joined the circle to pay tribute.
The healing circle had become a weekly tradition Thursdays at the covid testing site that began on July 9, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. At the time, Latinx residents filled Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, but few tests were being done in the community.
Over the course of the pandemic, the Latino Task Force, together with the researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, many based at San Francisco General, united to change that trajectory and offer low-barrier services.
But, in mid-January, the city announced it would be closing of neighborhood testing sites, including 701 Alabama. Although covid testing has ended, the site will continue offering HIV and blood-sugar testing every Thursday at the same time, to maintain a platform established over the last three and a half years. At-home covid test kits will also be available on-site.
“If anybody needs any consult or any other resources — food, employment taxes,” they can get them every Thursday, said Shalom Bandi, a Latino Task Force health coordinator who led the Alabama site during the pandemic.
The collaboration between the Latino Task Force and UCSF, known as Unidos en Salud or United in Health, sought to take care of the community hit hardest by the virus and understand why almost all of San Francisco General’s Covid-19 patients were Latinx.
It was a “scary” time, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen said from her spot in the healing circle. “Despite the fact that we didn’t know what [the virus] could do to you, you risked your lives every day by coming here,” she said. It’s “nothing short of heroic.”
Ronen’s work was key in getting the city and private donors to put money into a fund called Right to Recovery, which allowed workers sick with covid to get paid while they recovered at home.
The Alabama site became a model for others in the city, too, and the Unidos leadership was invited later to national conferences — and the White House — to explain how they developed their model.
“We used to always say, nobody came and told us what to do,” said Susana Rojas, the president of Calle 24 and a member of the task force’s executive committee. “We ran to the fire not knowing what tools, what kind of fire, what we needed to do — and we made it happen.”
Rojas was grateful for instruction from doctors at UCSF on everything from medical jargon to covid variants. In turn, the Latino Task Force, almost entirely made up of members with deep roots in the community, connected doctors with those in need, offering them an established network of trust.
The hub developed into a covid vaccine clinic by the end of 2020, and gradually added capabilities for HIV and A1C blood-sugar testing, and eventually distributed monkeypox vaccines and flu vaccines. The site also followed up with those who tested positive for covid, calling one week, two weeks and a month after a test.
In January, when the San Francisco Department of Public Health announced its decision to close the city’s six neighborhood covid vaccination sites by mid-February, it cited “significant budgetary challenges” and decreased demand for vaccines. The Alabama hub and another Unidos en Salud site at 24th and Capp streets have now both shuttered.
Valerie Tulier-Laiwa, a member of the Latino Task Force’s executive committee and one of the main drivers keeping the site alive, led the healing circle, standing in the middle with burning sage. Others included Tracy Gallardo, an aide to District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, and Susana Rojas, the director of Calle 24.
Those around the circle followed in silence. They felt “bittersweet,” said the doctors, nurses, community leaders, volunteers and city officials.
“We’re going to be able to give out [healthcare services] because the community knows us so well. They’ve come here for three years every single Thursday,” said Bandi. “We are a site for the community, and the community really relies on us.”
Many of the young people who started as volunteers at the site — as swabbers and administrators — have gone on to careers in health.
According to Bandi, some 20 of Unidos en Salud’s community wellness team, a group of 50 young people, are now in healthcare, with three in nursing programs and four hired by BayPLS, a Bay Area mobile healthcare service that conducted covid tests at the Alabama site and began in the thick of the pandemic when few places were processing tests.
An immigrant from India, Bandi graduated in 2020 with an astrophysics major from UCLA. Jobless, she was referred to the Latino Task Force, where she handled home test distribution, HIV testing events, patient follow-up and deliveries.
Susy Rojas, 30, had just finished her bachelor’s in wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis when she joined the team in 2020. “I was looking for an opportunity to help in whatever manner,” said Rojas, who also wanted to look after her diabetic mother, Susana Rojas, up close.
She started as a volunteer and soon moved on to be a community wellness coordinator, responsible for providing food and medicine to those who were in quarantine. The team expanded to 25 people during the omicron surge, when Rojas deployed case managers and drivers to drop off bags of food, sanitizing supplies and gift cards.
Rojas, who is now working for BayPLS, said Thursday was “not an end — it’s a transition.”
“It might be the end of this vaccine clinic,” she said. “However, there is still much work that needs to be done that I hope the city will take into account.”
When government could not care less that AIDS was ravaging gay men, we organized to compel action, fast track the development of treatments, and helped save millions, perhaps billions of lives over the decades.
When Mission Latinos were topping the list of Covid casualties, the best that the nonprofits could do was offer an aspirin and band aid, palliative care, waiting patiently until vaccines arrived on the scene from on high.
This is what 30 years of shameful domestication of activism into government funded nonprofits looks like–neoliberal patterns of cooption.
Are we to celebrate or cry on this occasion?
How COVID spreads (primarily by airborne transmission) is yet profoundly misunderstood by most people.
Hub workers may have been guests in the White House or found a stepping stone to more “fulfilling” careers, but COVID is still with us: infecting new victims every day.
In a strange way it saddens me that race as a factor was utilized to broaden support for what should have been rudimentary health measures for everyone.
When will people learn that it is not primarily one’s skin color or national origin that most determines one’s fate in life, but one’s class?
While millions have died and suffered, and untold numbers more are likely to, a minuscule class (who may share our skin colors and national origins), wined and dined, and made out like bandits throughout and now.
They are the same who promote wars and austerity for the masses, the international working class who make them rich by their sacrifices and labor.
The US is currently seeing 2,000 deaths-per-week from COVID (https://twitter.com/BNOFeed/status/1756820325839364356 ) and thousands more permanently disabled due to Long COVID during this not-over pandemic. Yet, the powers-that-be shut down invaluable resources like this clinic and actively insist people to go work and school when they know they’re sick. Vaccines and anti-virals are no longer free, meaning COVID-safety is almost exclusively a luxury for the rich.
That’s beyond shameful.
Thankfully, all the pro-🇵🇸 rallies of late have seen more and more activists in masks (https://flickr.com/photos/buddyl/53453983646 ).
We protect us.
#MaskUp 😷 #SocialDistance ↔️ #GetVaxxed 💉 #GetBoosted 💉