HOW 2020 HAS CHANGED US

JON JACOBO: THE DISASTER SERVICE WORKER

When the first cases of COVID19 began popping up in San Francisco this spring, Jon Jacobo gave himself a new job.

“I’m a selfinitiated disaster service worker,” he says. “I am not an epidemiologist, I am not an infectious disease doctor, but I kick it with them.”

Jacobo, who works on landuse and planning issues for nonprofit housing developer Todco in SoMa, already had a few other things on his schedule. He is vice president of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District and a commissioner in the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection and had been doing press secretary work in the Latino community for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in California. The Mission District native had imagined his 2020 being more about politics than public health.

“I thought Bernie was going to win,” says Jacobo. He expected to be working for the senator in New York from March to June.

Instead of traveling across the country to support Sanders, Jacobo has been traveling the 12 blocks of his immediate neighborhood as part of the Latino Task Force, a group of Latino community leaders and nonprofit organizations mounting a COVID response campaign at home.

In the early weeks of the Bay Area shelterinplace order, San Francisco was reporting total cases without detailed demographic data on who was getting sick. Dr. Diane Havlir, chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at UCSF, approached the Latino Task Force about doing a study in the Mission, testing residents to see who was most at risk of infection.

Jacobo was voluntold: “You’re going to lead this.”

He treated the initiative, called Unidos en Salud, like political work. “The approach was we’re going to doorknock, we’re going to flyer, we’re going to phonebank, we’re going to register.”

And the community responded. Over four days in April, Unidos en Salud tested 4,200 people in the Mission for the coronavirus, onethird of whom were Latino.

“The findings were the most painful thing in many ways,” Jacobo says. Of the people who tested positive, 95% were Latino, 90% were unable to isolate at home and 80% made under $ 50,000. “It was this reality that it was Latinos living in congregated living situations who were essential workers.”

That data crystallized a sense of purpose for Jacobo. “From that moment until now, my life has completely pivoted and completely changed,” he says.

Almost immediately, San Francisco authorized testing for essential workers, and over the last eight months, Jacobo and the task force have honed a testtocare model, setting up screening sites at BART stations and testing more than 20,000 people, distributing thousands of boxes of food, and connecting those who test positive with the support they need to isolate and recover.

On a recent day in December, Jacobo had just talked to Hugo, a young man whose father died of COVID in Guatemala and who had recently tested positive. He lives with his mother, wife and two kids in San Francisco, and needed food, cleaning supplies and money to stay home in quarantine and miss two weeks of work. He had heard about the city’s Right to Recover program, but the fund was out of cash.

That a city with a $ 13 billion budget was unable to respond to its most marginalized residents in a time of crisis has opened Jacobo’s eyes.

“COVID has been the emergency of my life,” he says. “It’s felt like we’ve been battling a fivealarm fire neighborhoodwide and every day you have to go try to put things out.

“What I know without a doubt is that this has doubled down on my love and compassion for my community and the city of San Francisco.”