BART partners with Latino Task Force on COVID-19 and UCSF for testing at 24th St. Mission plaza

UC San Francisco (UCSF), infectious disease specialists and community partners in San Francisco’s Mission district, has partnered with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to enhance the ability of public health officials to detect and contain the spread of COVID-19 among the Latinx community and essential workers.

BART says it is believed to be a first-in-the-nation pilot program to provide low-barrier COVID-19 testing at a central transit hub.

“We are part of the fabric of each community we serve,” said BART Director Bevan Dufty. “That’s why it’s essential we now partner with community leaders and UCSF to do everything we can to address the COVID-19 challenge disproportionately affecting our Mission community.”

The pilot testing initiative will occur at the 24th Street and Mission Plaza transit hub on Wednesdays and Fridays for three weeks, beginning on July 29. Testing will be available from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The testing program will include on-site registration and PCR-based testing, with the option for participants to self-administer the tests or have them administered by a laboratory technician. The initiative will include a fast-track lane for people who work at local Mission businesses as well as BART employees.

“In order to reduce community transmission of COVID-19 to a level where we can start opening up society again, there is an urgent need to deploy testing to persons most at-risk for infection,” said Dr. Diane Havlir, chief of the UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine and director of Ward 86 at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG). “With the idea that public transit is heavily utilized by frontline workers, we’ve partnered with BART to test the feasibility of setting up disease monitoring at a central transit hub in the Mission. If successful, we hope that this can become a model for low-barrier disease monitoring for Latinx and other at-risk communities across California.”

The project is led by Unidos En Salud — a collaboration between UCSF and the Latino Task Force on COVID-19 — in partnership with BART, the office of San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub. Along with recent initiatives to provide testing in the town of Bolinas and for housed and unhoused people in the Bayview, Sunnydale and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods in southeast San Francisco, the collaboration is part of UCSF’s coordinated work with the city and county of San Francisco, the state of California and affected communities to respond to the public health crisis presented by COVID-19.

In a late April study, Unidos En Salud identified the outsized exposure risk facing Latinx essential workers and their families in the Mission, driven in part by inequalities in economic and housing security. Despite San Francisco’s efforts to provide free testing to all essential workers, this same high-risk population continues to experience significant barriers to testing, including inability to take time off work to get tested, lack of access to medical systems and fear of potential consequences of a positive test, including the need to go into isolation, potentially putting income and job security at risk, says BART.

"Bringing more testing to the Mission and making it so accessible is very exciting to me,” said Susana Rojas, executive director of Calle 24 Latino Cultural District and member of the Latino Task Force. “As the tests results continue to show, essential workers and Latinos are being affected the most by COVID-19. This kind of testing can potentially reach the essential worker population that is most in need, giving us an opportunity to identify, isolate and help resource those who test positive, hopefully helping reduce the rate of infection."

The program will replicate the community-based “Test to Care” model that Unidos En Salud developed in its earlier Mission District study. Those with positive PCR results will quickly be notified by phone by the Unidos En Salud team, while those with negative results will be able to view their results online. Those who test positive will be provided with services during isolation and quarantine, including food, cleaning supplies, social support and linkage to care and social protection programs such as San Francisco’s “Right to Recover” law, enacted in May, which guarantees two weeks of replacement income to workers who must self-isolate due to COVID-19 infection.

The study will measure prevalence and risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection, including surveying participants on factors such as public transportation use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In collaboration with the CZBiohub, the researchers will sequence viral samples to characterize circulating SARS-CoV-2 viral strains in San Francisco to better understand how strains are circulating in the Bay Area.

“We are grateful to have another opportunity to partner with UCSF on this important study that focuses on our Latinx community members and essential workers in the Mission,” said San Francisco Director of Health Dr. Grant Colfax. “This partnership is critical in understanding the virus, supporting those most impacted and identifying resources needed to combat the virus. Together, we hope this study will better inform all of us how to effectively reach our communities most at risk and further slow the spread of the virus.”

"In order for us to tackle this problem head on we need to get creative in how we do testing and where we focus it. We need to bring the testing to the people,” said Jon Jacobo, chair of the Latino Task Force Health Committee. “As we know, the Latino community has been hit hard and we need to ensure that as a city we are lowering the barriers to testing while increasing the resources for those who need support most. We hope that this approach can help protect our community, our beloved city, and the Bay Area as a whole."

The Unidos En Salud initiative is part of the recently launched UCSF COVID-19 Community Public Health Initiative. Led by Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, vice dean for population health and health equity at the UCSF School of Medicine, the initiative focuses on communities and populations disproportionately affected by the virus, and on building durable community partnerships.

In addition to COVID-19 testing, UCSF’s closely coordinated response to COVID-19 with the city and county of San Francisco, other Bay Area communities and the state of California has included providing forecasts about the pandemic across the state and advice and counsel on pandemic response by UCSF epidemiologists; implementing a statewide contact tracing program in collaboration with the California Department of Health; providing $1 million and clinical expertise for the city to open a COVID-19 unit at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital; and opening a new, 53-bed respiratory isolation unit at UCSF Health’s Mount Zion hospital to expand the city’s overall hospital capacity for potential future surges, while offering dedicated space for current patients.