While shelters have experienced giant outbreaks of COVID-19, the virus does not appear to have devastated the homeless as many feared. However, researchers and advocates say it is unknown how the pandemic affects about a million homeless people to others in the United States.
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In a country that has surpassed five million known cases and 169,000 deaths, researchers know why there appears to be so few epidemics among homeless people.
“I’m surprised, I think I can say that, because it’s a very vulnerable population. I don’t know what we’re going to see after that,” said Dr. Deborah Borne, who oversees the COVID-19 homeless reaction fitness policy at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “That’s why we call it a new virus, because we don’t know.”
More than two hundred of San Francisco’s estimated 8,000 homeless people tested positive for the virus, and part of it came here from an outbreak at a homeless shelter in April. A homeless man in 69 dead in the city.
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In other locations with giant populations of homeless people, the numbers are also low. In King County, which includes Seattle, more than 400 of the 12,000 homeless citizens have been diagnosed. In Los Angeles County, more than 1,200 of the 66,000 homeless people have been diagnosed.
It is superior in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, where approximately 500 of the estimated 7,400 homeless people in others tested positive, nine of whom died.
Health experts say the numbers do not imply the extent of the disease or its long-term progression. It is not known how many more people have died from virus-related diseases. While coronaviruses can burn more gently outdoors than indoors, living outdoors carries its own risks.
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With the closure of public libraries and other places, other homeless people say they lack food and water, bathrooms and money. In San Francisco, 50 homeless people died in 8 weeks in April and May, twice the same rate above, said Dr. Barry Zevin, medical director of the Department of Public Health’s street medicine program.
Official bodies are pending, however, Zevin notes that fentanyl overdoses are increasing and that prescriptions can prevent others from consuming them quickly. I knew isolation can lead to more overdose.
“I think it happened, and it’s pretty much what I expected, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s frustrating to be able to anticipate something resembling a problem, do everything we can to fix it, but it’s certainly a case of competing priorities.”
Good knowledge of homelessness because hospitals and the death certificate adhere to the state of the home, says Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations at the University of California, San Francisco.
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He hesitated to draw conclusions about how the pandemic has affected homeless people in general, but said, “This could be an example where being homeless and homeless, only in terms of COVID, would possibly allow others to have a lower risk. But again, one component of that is because we just don’t know.”
New York City reported more than 1,400 infections and 104 deaths among homeless citizens of more than 226,000 positive cases and 19,000 deaths. Approximately 60,000 other people live in shelters, unlike West Coast cities where many others have no seeds.
But because New York City shelters have more youth than the general population, when deaths adjust by age, the homeless mortality rate is 67 percent higher than that of the general population, said Giselle Routhier, policy director of the Homeless Coalition.
“It’s extremely high, in our opinion, ” he said.
As advocates push for personal hotel rooms for the homeless, a massive 1,200-person shelter at the San Diego Convention Center shows that it is conceivable to reduce the number of cases by strictly respecting a 2-meter space, common cleaning and a mask. -carrying.
“We have a team of firefighters who are checking the floors so that the camp beds return to where they need to be,” said Deputy Chief of FireMan Chris Heiser, who is the shelter’s operations commander.
He estimates that some 3,000 more people have passed through there. And of the more than 6000 COVID-19 tests administered, 18 to date have been positive. San Diego County has reported more than two hundred positive cases and no deaths among its nearly 8,000 homeless people.
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Richard Scott, 50, moved to the conference center about 3 months ago after his roommate, who is medically fragile, told him he could stay home and paint or leave. Since then, Scott has slept in a cot next to about 500 men in a cavernous room with high ceilings and a giant floor.
Sometimes there’s a robbery or a disturbing person, but in general, Scott calls it a position to stay.
“We wash our hands 20 times a day, well, some of us, and we check our temperatures every day, and they’ve also been very strict about it,” Scott said. “I am so pleased to be here; it’s a blessing.”
Virginia McShane, 63, sleeps in a separate component of the center. Arrived in April after that may no longer be a $25 hostel per night.
“We have an important back front and front, and that allows the air to circulate well, so I think that’s why we don’t all contract the coronavirus,” he said.
The rates that other homeless people have tested positive for COVID-19 are everywhere, says Barbara DiPietro, senior policy director at the National Homeless Health Care Council, which works with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the problem.
Monitoring tests of more than 10,000 people in shelters and camps across the country have resulted in a rate of more than 8%. But DiPietro says more than two hundred homeless citizens’ tests in five cities have shown rates ranging from 0 to 66 percent.
“So it’s an extravagant variant, a moving target depending on who, how and when the test is performed,” he says.
Associated Press editor Anita Snow contributed to Phoenix’s story.
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