California's Covid emergency may be over, but the pandemic persists and has some activists urging San Francisco to keep policies that protect vulnerable people from the virus.
Proponents of local safety measures rallied at City Hall on Monday with signs advocating for masking, which activists said should continue in health care facilities and public buildings. They also urged the city to extend eviction protections through 2024.
They worry that, if San Francisco’s leaders don’t heed their warning, people at high risk from Covid may lose their access to public spaces.
“We do not want to backslide on the progress that we've made to keep people safe through the pandemic,” organizer Kristin Urquiza said. “And without action, we're afraid that people could fall through the cracks, in particular the most vulnerable amongst us.”
California became the first U.S. state to order lockdowns in March 2020. San Francisco, in particular, was widely credited for a strong, early Covid response that kept the death toll relatively low.
But as Covid wanes and public life goes back to normal, even politicians appear ready to move on. That worries Urquiza.
“I felt safe and protected [in San Francisco] through the majority of the pandemic,” she said. “And that was because we continue to have clear and decisive direction on how to reduce harm and protect one another.”
Preventing More Death
Urquiza lost her father, Mark, to Covid in 2020 and says her mother suffers from long Covid. She rose to prominence after publishing an unusually candid obituary for her father that blamed his death on the carelessness of political leaders.
She also founded Marked by Covid, a nonprofit focused on pandemic justice and remembrance.
Online, the organization is vocal and sometimes strident in its push for mitigation measures—increasingly a minority position in American society. In person, the message is more subtle.
Urquiza joined a small group of fellow activists at City Hall on Monday to deliver a letter with recommendations for Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors.
Part protest, part political glad-handing, the rally ascended from City Hall’s entrance to the grand staircase in the rotunda and on to Breed’s office to hand the demand letter to the mayor’s staff. The group went office-to-office to deliver the missive to the rest of the board and briefly struck up a conversation with Supervisor Rafael Mandelman in the corridor.
Among their messages: They want to know the city’s plan for addressing the pandemic once the emergency declaration ends. It’s not clear that the city’s leaders have one yet.
“We’re still trying to get answers to those questions ourselves,” Melissa Hernandez, a legislative aide to Supervisor Dean Preston, told Urquiza as she delivered the letter.
Vulnerable Populations
Besides Urquiza, most participants in the rally said they were at high risk from Covid, so preventing its spread was important to their health.
“I am disabled, and I would like to be able to access health care safely,” said Elizabeth, who declined to give her last name. “It’s really important to keep the mask requirement so we can safely access health care.”
Ending California’s Covid emergency potentially means the general public will no longer have to wear masks in most medical facilities, jails and homeless shelters—though San Francisco will require staff to wear face coverings.
Anakh Sul Rama, a housing activist, said that despite multiple disabilities making him immunocompromised, he’s been sick less often during the pandemic thanks to masks. And he said the same is true for other people he knows.
“It’s helpful to be able to navigate life with a mask and not have to worry about whether you’re going to get sick,” he said. “The society that we want to live in is a society that takes care of our most vulnerable communities.”
Urquiza pointed out that several rally participants would not enter City Hall because they believe it would be too great a risk to their personal health.
“How is this defending democracy, if people can’t actually talk to their elected officials?” she asked.
She hopes to have a chance to sit down with San Francisco’s leaders and work to avert more Covid deaths like the one that rocked her family.
“As a result of losing my dad, I feel like I had a front row seat to the most awful thing that happened to too many people in this country,” Urquiza said. “And I do not feel comfortable sitting idly by, knowing that folks that are more vulnerable than me may face the same fate as my father.”