With COVID-19 positivity cases on the rise fueled by the Delta variant, Meals on Wheels SF is seeing an increase in meals and groceries request from people of all ages coming through the Isolation and Quarantine food hotline.

Despite San Francisco’s high COVID-19 vaccination rate of 75% of residents 12 and older who have received one dose, the current 7-day rolling average of new positive COVID-19 cases in the City is hovering around 267 as of August 1, 2021, according to data collected by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. That average is 8x what it was on July 5 when SFDPH reported a rolling case average of 32.

The Delta variant is hitting black and brown communities harder than others in San Francisco per the graphic shown here which represents the percentage of people requesting meals from Meals on Wheels through the City’s Isolation and Quarantine Food hotline (IQ).

Between July 1 and July 25, Meals on Wheels San Francisco helped 249 people, including families who are quarantining, get set up on our home-delivered meals program as part of the IQ program which we’ve been managing in partnership with the City since June of 2020. For comparison, during the month of June this year, we had 90 referrals.

While the numbers of people requesting food through the IQ hotline are currently not as high as what we saw in the last quarter of 2020 and during the first couple of months of 2021 when approximately 50 requests came in daily, we do know one thing – the Delta Variant has a very real impact in key communities (vaccinated or not), and as positive case counts go up, so do the number of requests for meals.

Updated December 2021:

Between June 2020 and October 2021, we provided meals to four times the number of people in need — the most in our 51-year history.

Did You Know?

The number of people (adults and children) Meals on Wheels SF served through the Isolation and Quarantine Food hotline who were impacted by COVID-19 in 2020 was 11,236. The top three neighborhoods with the most need for home-delivered meals and groceries included:

• Ingleside-Excelsior / Crocker Amazon — 889
• Inner Mission / Bernal Heights — 816
• Bayview / Hunters Point — 754
• Read more about our COVID-19 pandemic response.