As coronavirus spreads across the U.S., 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 sanitizer, 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, D.C., 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.
Source: Yahoo
