Of the more than 200 people at the Union Rescue Mission in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles who were tested for the COVID-19 earlier this week, 43 people tested positive, county officials reported Tuesday, April 22.
The shelter was hit with its first case on March 28, and later saw more cases among homeless residents of the facility. Over the past week, more widespread testing was done at the shelter, with both symptomatic and asymptomatic people getting tested.
The results of 178 tests have been delivered to date, according to Los Angeles County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer. Of the 43 positive cases, 37% were symptomatic and 63% were asymptomatic, she said.
Ferrer said that they work with each institution to work out the “particulars” of how testing could best be done. But she added that as testing capabilities expand, more residents in group facilities, including people without symptoms, should be tested.
“Our desire, our wish is that over the next week we really have increased our capacity to be able to offer more testing at all of the institutional testing where there are outbreaks,” she said. “It just makes sense now that we’re able to do more testing both of symptomatic people and asymptomatic people who are very high risk and live in these congregate living situations.”
A surge in testing of people experiencing homelessness took place this week, under a “street medical team” program announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti. A pop-up testing site was put up in Skid Row, according to a city news release.
The mayor said Tuesday evening that the pop-up site has done 186 tests, and the mobile team is among three crews that are also being sent to nursing centers, assisted living facilities and senior-care facilities.
According to Garcetti, the teams have also:
- Performed 2,500 proactive medical checks on people experiencing homelessness
- Identified 100 symptomatic people
- And transported people to get care and places to quarantine themselves
Ferrer said Tuesday that all of the people who tested positive at the mission are going into isolation, and the shelter has agreed to quarantine those who remain. No new guests are being admitted at the shelter in order to control the outbreak, she said.
People who are still at the shelter are practicing social distancing and wearing cloth masks. Daily screenings and deep cleaning have been enhanced, Ferrer said.
Over the past two weeks, 184 people were moved to hotels and motels, many of them close to Union Rescue Mission, she said.
The shelter had 1,000 residents at one time, according to the mission’s chief executive officer, Andy Bales. They are now down to just about 400 people.
“There has never been enough space to have their own rooms, but we’re as close to that as we will ever be now,” he said.
Amid the pandemic, many people who had been living at the shelter were moved to a tent structure, and other sites opened up by the county where they could be quarantined.
The mission has had to reduce the number of residents, because they are trying to give each person 50 square feet of space. Bales said that in a “223-bunkbed men’s dorm,” there are now 80 single beds together in a “big room.”
The earlier death of a staff member, Gerald Shiroma, hit Bales and others “like a ton of bricks,” Bales said.
“[He] came to us as a guest and went through recovery, graduated … became an apprentice driver, and then became a beloved teammate who gathered all the guys to go to church every week — to lose Gerald hit us hard,” he said.
The several dozen people who tested positive at the mission are expected to significantly bring up the number of people experiencing homelessness who count among the county’s more than 15,000 cases.
On Monday, Ferrer had reported that 47 people experiencing homelessness had tested positive for COVID-19, and that 12 were at shelters. A total of eight shelters had positive cases, she said.
County officials did not immediately provide the specific shelter sites, but the county’s website lists three recreation centers that were recently converted into homeless shelters as facilities where people have tested positive.
One of those shelters, at the Granada Hills Recreation Center in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles city, went under quarantine after one resident’s test results came back positive in early April.
That facility now has 14 residents, according to the city recreation and parks website. After an initial group of people were re-located, there were more than 20 people left at the site, with residents being slowly been moved off site in the past two weeks.
Over the weekend, a staffer at the Granada Hills facility tested positive, so a quarantine that had been set to close was extended to Friday, according to shelter operator Ken Craft. The county’s list indicates the staff member was a “probable” case.
As of Monday, the two other recreation center facilities were Pan Pacific in the Fairfax area, and Denker, near USC.
Editor’s note: A photo posted with an earlier version of this story incorrectly displayed the Los Angeles Rescue Mission, which has not reported any cases of the novel coronavirus.
