Health officer:
San Francisco official Tomás Aragón has been chosen to lead the California Department of Public Health.
San Francisco Health Officer Tomás Aragón, a highprofile local voice throughout the coronavirus pandemic, was named head of the California Department of Public Health on Monday, rising to become one of the top officials shaping the state’s response to the crisis.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Aragón’s appointment, which comes after Dr. Sonia Angell abruptly announced her resignation in August after less than a year on the job.
Acting public health director Sandra Shewry and Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan have led the department since Angell’s departure. Aragón will assume both roles, though a start date has not been determined, the state Public Health Department said.
Pan, a former Alameda County health officer, will resume her role as California state epidemiologist after Aragón takes over.
His appointment comes amid a huge statewide coronavirus surge that has prompted Newsom to issue new restrictions amid worries
that some regions will run out of hospital beds. The state recorded 24,735 new coronavirus infections statewide on Sunday, with a 7day average of 21,924 as the virus continues a steep escalation, Newsom said during a news conference Monday.
Aragón has been arguably the most powerful public official in San Francisco during the pandemic, though he worked mostly behind the scenes. He will fill an even more critical role as the state’s new public health leader, helping the state battle its largest surge and reshape Californians’ way of life next year.
“By tapping Dr. Aragón as Director of the California Department of Public Health, Gov. Gavin Newsom is recognizing what many of us have known for years: that Tomás is an exceptional public health leader, professor, doctor and Californian who will always put equity first,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, in a statement.
“I have seen firsthand how Tomás leads with humility, curiosity and compassion — qualities that have served us well for decades, but never so much as in the COVID19 pandemic,” Colfax continued. “His steady, thoughtful approach in San Francisco’s emergency response has saved lives, especially in our city’s vulnerable populations, and has garnered praise from around the world.”
Aragón has shaped and signed each San
Francisco health order and in doing so has mandated that hundreds of thousands of residents shelter in their homes, decided which businesses can stay open and which must close, and called for mandatory public maskwearing.
“He has a deep, theoretical understanding — particularly of infectious diseases — theory that goes into ( all of this) sophisticated mathematical modeling,” Dr. Arthur Reingold, chair of epidemiology at the UC
Berkeley School of Public Health, told The Chronicle in June.
“But he also has this wealth of realworld, ontheground public health experience,” said Reingold, who has known Aragón for two decades. “That combination is unusual in my experience.”
San Francisco Mayor London Breed thanked Aragón for his service during the pandemic and for “his years of working to advance community health efforts.”
“Dr. Aragón has been a thoughtful leader who has helped shape San Francisco’s response to this pandemic,” Breed said in a statement. “Thanks to the early and sustained action we have taken under the guidance of our public health officials like Dr. Aragón, San Francisco has the lowest death rate of any major city. Our state has a long and difficult road ahead and we know Dr. Aragón will continue to serve us all in his new role with the state.”
Aragón, 60, was born and raised in the Mission District to parents who arrived in the U. S. from Nicaragua in the 1950s. His mother raised Aragón and his three siblings as a single mom working as a seamstress. After volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital as a Spanishlanguage translator, he became interested in medicine and went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1988 with a medical degree and a master’s of public health.
After earning his degrees, Aragón returned to San Francisco for his residency training during the peak of the AIDS crisis.
“I started my medical career with one pandemic, and I’ll probably end my career with another pandemic,” he told The Chronicle this summer.
Aragón started working for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health in 1996, where he directed the community health, epidemiology and disease control efforts. Some of his work included documenting racial disparities in public health in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.
Angell, the state’s former health director, resigned less than a week after state officials revealed that a problem with a computer system had resulted in undercounting of new coronavirus cases in late July and early August.