Omicron outbreak shuts down crucial West Oakland homeless shelter

The omicron variant proved too much for one of Oakland's only nightly homeless shelters to keep its doors open and guests safe.

A COVID-19 outbreak affecting approximately 20 unhoused residents has temporarily shut down St. Vincent de Paul's shelter, which has operated nightly on San Pablo Avenue during the pandemic.

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The city-funded shelter had been serving roughly 40 guests each night, and recently received winter-relief funds to open an additional room on especially cold or wet nights.

Seventeen of the guests who tested positive were moved into county-run isolation hotel shelters, where they can quarantine. A couple other residents declined to move there, but it left about ten guests who tested negative to find their own shelter for the night.

In late December, there were 25 unhoused people isolating in quarantine hotels, according to the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. This past weekend there were more than 400.

"This pandemic has really been a crisis upon a crisis when you overlay onto our longstanding homelessness crisis," Dr. Margot Kushel, Professor at UCSF and a Director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, told KCBS Radio.

And although the vaccines have done an outstanding job of protecting against critical illness, congregate living like shelters still have risks.

"(Omicron) is just so transmissible that it's hard to keep people living together in congregate shelters once somebody has it, it's very hard to keep others from getting it," Dr. Kushel said.

"In the Bay Area many people who would like to be in shelters have been unable to, and that's even more true now."

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