A View From The Brink ... the beach is backwards

SF Scientist Leads Team Fighting COVID-19

     

UCSF research scientist and Sunset District resident Peter Walter, PhD, is working with a team on a weapon against COVID-19. Photo by Steve Babuljak, courtesy UCSF.

    

By Thomas K. Pendergast

      

As scientists around the world scramble to make a vaccine to fight COVID-19, a San Francisco team of about 60 people – co-led by a Sunset District resident – is working on a unique potential solution that is roughly analogous to a molecular prophylactic. 

UCSF’s Peter Walter, PhD, is leading this effort with his collaborator, Dr. Aashish Manglik, to test and produce AeroNabs, a nasal spray or nebulizing inhaler that would act as a first line of defense against infection in the nose, throat and lungs, where the virus enters the body. 

The spray is not an anti-viral vaccine, but instead uses nanobodies, tiny molecular proteins that “sheath” parts of the virus attempting to penetrate the cell, thus preventing replication.

     

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Toy Boat Dessert Cafe Owners Set Sail After 38 Years In Business

     

Roberta Mindich-Fink and Jesse Fink share stories of the people they have met since opening the Toy Boat Cafe in the Richmond District of San Francisco in 1982. 

          

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

     

Roberta Mindich-Fink and Jesse Fink remember so many people who have come through the doors of Toy Boat Dessert Cafe, at the corner of Clement Street and Fifth Avenue, that it is hard to recall all of them at once.

Sitting in their small ice cream parlor surrounded by a menagerie of 20th century Americana toys, they reminisce about Mike, who always said “hubba, hubba, hubba;” the elderly lady, Bernice, who made the Toy Boat a part of her daily routine; and famous people who stopped by, like actor Robin Williams or Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

They started their business in 1982, so they have been a part of the neighborhood fabric for 38 years.

But, just as all fairy tales must come to an end, this “Toy Boat” is sailing off into the sunset, because Jesse and Roberta are retiring.

         

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Homeless Camps Pop Up In San Francisco's Richmond District

        

A line of tents stretches along 48th Avenue at Fulton Street, behind the Safeway on La Playa Street. A blue portable restroom can be seen in the background.

      

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

       

On May 5, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors acknowledged that a virus had just suspended years of city policy to break up homeless camps when they get too big. 

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued COVID-19  guidelines, which stressed that if homeless people are voluntarily encamped in their own tents, this was a better situation for slowing down the spread of the virus than dispersing the people and potentially sending the virus with them. 

Following the CDC guidelines, the board passed an emergency ordinance to provide staffed restroom facilities for homeless encampments at a ratio of 1 per 50 unsheltered people. District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney said that a month before, the City only had three 24-hour bathrooms. The new legislation would eventually increase the number of facilities to 49.

Since then, homeless encampments throughout the City have been provided with portable restrooms, washing stations and attendants, including three in the Richmond District: in front of the old Alexandria Theater at 18th Avenue and Geary Boulevard, on the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa Street, and on 48th Avenue behind the Safeway at La Playa and Fulton streets near Ocean Beach. 

       

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Small Businesses Struggle To Stay Afloat As SF Shutdown Is Extended

       

Green Apple Books on the Park, on Ninth Avenue near Lincoln Way, is one of many stores trying to adapt to the reality that businesses considered non-essential need to stay closed to help prevent the spread of the Coronavirus.

       

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

     

As San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order is extended through May to avoid a tsunami of new COVID-19 infections, like the Spanish Flu’s second wave that killed millions more people than the first, small businesses are drowning in debt and struggling to stay afloat. 

A preliminary estimate by the San Francisco Controller's office on the number of businesses that will likely be either partially or fully impacted by the city's shelter-in-place order is more than 14,000, possibly resulting in nearly 167,000 lost jobs. 

San Francisco was the first city and county in the US to order shelter-in-place on March 16. 

       

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Keeping the life savers alive

           

 

Tina Cen-Camarao and Edwin Camarao are fundraising and distributing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to hospitals in and around San Francisco for their staffs, so that these healthcare workers can be better protected against the Coronavirus.

 

By Thomas K. Pendergast

 

(Originally posted on the website of the Sunset Beacon and Richmond Review, April 20, 2020)

 

    

Charges dropped against former Edgewood Center employee

     

 

     

By Thomas K. Pendergast

     

All sexual assault charges against a former employee of the Edgewood Center for Children and Families in San Francisco’s Sunset District have been dropped for lack of evidence, although another former employee still faces unrelated charges alleging possession of child pornography. 

Founded as an orphanage 169 years ago, today Edgewood treats children suffering from an array of psychiatric and behavioral problems. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, they served about 11,000 children and families in 2018, mostly through outpatient programs.   

     

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Engineer arrested for derailing train near USNS Mercy, claimed ship part of ‘government takeover’

       

Photo courtesy of CBS Los Angeles

      

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – A train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles was arrested Wednesday for allegedly derailing a locomotive at full speed near the USNS Mercy hospital ship being used to ease hospital beds during the coronavirus pandemic.

Eduardo Moreno, 44, of San Pedro, was charged in a criminal complaint with one federal count of train wrecking, which carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

During an initial interview with port police, prosecutors say Moreno admitted crashing the train, saying he was suspicious of the Mercy and believed it had an alternate purpose related to COVID-19, such as a “government takeover.”

Moreno later stated in a second interview with FBI agents that “he did it out of the desire to ‘wake people up,”’ according to the affidavit. “Moreno stated that he thought that the U.S.N.S. Mercy was suspicious and did not believe ‘the ship is what they say it’s for'”.

      

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Mapping a pandemic: Track the spread of coronavirus across Washington State and the world

       

       

Washington state, site of the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus in the country on Jan. 20, also became the nation’s first epicenter of the outbreak on Feb. 29 with the publicly announced death of a person, at a Kirkland hospital, and an eruption of cases at a nursing home.  

The Seattle Times newspaper reports that coronavirus has continued to spread across the state. Public health agencies agree that the number of confirmed cases greatly underrepresents the true number of people infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Most people experience only mild illness, and testing is still not widely available.

Here’s what we know so far about the statewide spread of the illness and its global impacts.

       

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Bay Area coronavirus updates: Santa Clara County now reporting 79 cases

     

This undated electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, pink, cultured in the lab. Also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus causes COVID-19.

    

LATEST: March 13, 12 p.m.: Santa Clara County now has 79 cases of coronavirus with seven infected patients hospitalized.

Of the total cases, 43 are a result of community transmission, meaning the individual doesn't have a travel history to an area with an outbreak or known contact with an infected patient.

"We expect many, many more cases to come," said Dr. Sara Cody, the county's health officer.

Cody signed an order banning events with more than 100 people.

The county has the most coronavirus cases in the Bay Area and has a population of 1.9 million people.

Beginning Monday, schools in the county will be closing for three weeks.
     

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San Francisco group files lawsuit to thwart Laurel Heights development

      

     

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

        

A lawsuit has been filed against a proposed redevelopment plan for 3333 California St. by the proponents of an alternative plan, after they lost an appeal of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ approval.

Among the many points of contention about the project is the cutting down of 226 mature trees on the 10-acre parcel at the same time that experts are saying we only have about a decade to deal with climate change before its effects become irreversible. Trees are an effective way to reduce greenhouse gases like carbon, because they take it out of the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.

Furthermore, it appears that the City follows the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) rules in analyzing new construction projects, but the “carbon sequestration” potential for trees – that is the amount of carbon trees remove from the atmosphere – seems to be a minor consideration at best, or it is not considered at all.

       

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