Fight coronavirus. Find homes for the homeless

As coronavirus spreads across the US, epidemiologists and public health experts keep hitting one message: Stay home. Without social distancing, Covid-19 could kill nearly 2 million Americans — perhaps 17 times as many as there would be if everyone hunkers down. This is why, as of early April, the vast majority of Americans are living under shelter-at-home orders. But what about those who have no homes? On any given day, more than 550,000 people live in the country’s shelters and on its streets. It’s a human tragedy — and a huge hole in the country’s public-health fabric.
Sickness is both a cause and effect of homelessness: It’s hard to stay healthy without reliable access to showers, laundry and toilets, for example, or to manage diabetes if you don’t have a fridge to store insulin.
So while people without homes often go to great lengths to stay clean — long before there were bidding wars over hand sanitiser, researchers found its use was nearly universal among the homeless — they nevertheless remain at elevated risk of Covid-19, as well as almost all other health problems. This is true even of those with health insurance.
And crucially, most homeless people in America aren’t sleeping rough: They’re living out of view in shelters. While these facilities do an admirable job of preventing, say, frostbite, they aren’t designed for social distancing. Indeed, they’re frequently overcrowded: In some New York City shelters, it’s not uncommon for people to sleep 12 to a room. In Washington, one room can accommodate as many as 60. In Las Vegas, when a shelter with more than 500 beds was forced to temporarily close due to the coronavirus, its residents were relocated to a parking lot.
Ultimately, homeless shelters are prone to outbreaks for the same reason cruise ships are: When lots of people live close together, it’s like a petri dish.
This is terrible news for shelter residents — many of whom are elderly, more than 100,000 of whom are children, and none of whom deserves to be sick. And it’s a risk to everyone else, too. A substantial number of people in the shelter system hold full-time jobs — frequently in the crucial but low-paying sectors now deemed “essential.”
The pandemic has also shown that no man is an island in the healthcare system. Homeless people are already disproportionately likely to use hospital services, and according to one conservative estimate, some 22,000 will need to be hospitalised due to Covid-19. (A grimmer estimate has the number at roughly 50,000.)
At a time when ventilators, beds, masks and medical professionals are in short supply, why not take basic preventive action to keep the most vulnerable people from falling ill in the first place?
—Bloomberg