This story was supported through the Pulitzer Center.
PHOENIX – Nearly two hundred tents are placed within inches of each other on burning gravel grounds, covered at most with blankets for an extra layer of desert sun relief. Outside, its occupants in warm floors or folding chairs, near shadeless palm trees. Despite the 12-square-foot sections painted on the gravel, there is little social distance for Phoenix’s homeless population.
Created through local government in late April as a transitional solution for some of the 3,700 homeless people, fenced land along the edge of the city center promised 24-hour security, social remoteness, and access to water and restrooms. But citizens complain that hygiene products are scarce and that no measures are being taken to involve the spread of COVID-19.
“We were ignored,” said Elisheyah, 61. “There’s no security, there’s no guarantee you can be here.”
Homeless people are one of the most vulnerable populations in the coronavirus pandemic, yet they are largely invisible victims of the crisis. Very little is known about their fate, in part because the Housing and Urban Development Decompotor, the leading federal firm that oversees the systems for them, has not asked its national network of providers to collect data on infections or deaths. This is despite the fact that, unlike other high-risk teams living in congregations, such as citizens and prisoners in retirement homes, homeless people interact more with the general public.
At the start of the pandemic in March, researchers warned that at least 1,700 of the estimated 568,000 homeless people living in the country could die from COVID-19. The Trump administration’s homeless tsar, Robert Marbut, told Congress in July that there had been only 130 deaths of homeless people, noting that it “significantly decreased from what was originally planned.”
However, the Howard Research Journalism Center traced at least 153 homeless deaths at the same time in just six spaces with a population of homeless people (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, Seattle and Phoenix) and at least 206 deaths nationwide in early August.
“This country has long canceled the lives of the homeless,” said Margot Kushel, a nationally identified homelessness expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And now that’s literally what will make it very difficult to control this pandemic.”
Kushel called the pandemic a “crisis crisis,” noting that the maximum number of homeless people who are in worse physical shape and, with widespread closures in reaction to the pandemic, have lost access to facilities that offer food, water and shelter.
Only a dozen states identified their homeless populations when they issued orders to stay at home. Arizona stated that “other homeless people are exempt from this directive, but are encouraged to seek refuge as soon as possible.” Delaware also noted that homeless citizens were not “subject to this shelter in a smart position.” But orders from Idaho and Kentucky did not refer to homeless people, even though they were careful to mention golf and guns respectively.
Congress has allocated more than $4 billion to specific homeless systems under the Coronavirus Assistance, Relief and Economic Security Act and has earned billions more dollars at the discretion of federal and state officials. But four months after CARES’s approval, most of that cash had not gone to local communities, the Howard Center found. Meanwhile, the scenes, officials in Washington are looking to replace the long-standing policy of fighting homelessness, and state and local politicians disagree on whether the budget deserves to be used to help people who have lately been left homeless or who are in danger of fitting into the economic situation. cave that accompanied the pandemic.
The Howard Center spent 3 months investigating the effect of COVID-19 on the homeless, analyzing the expected knowledge of which homeless populations in the country would be most vulnerable. Four3 counties were known most likely to fight the pandemic, many of which, such as Imperial in California and Maricopa in Arizona, continued to expand some of the highest infection rates in the country. Journalists also interviewed more than 80 professionals in the field of homelessness, epidemiology and public health, as well as other homeless people in sensitive areas, who described their daily struggles. And because homelessness is regularly a challenge left to local communities, hounds have filed 140 applications for public records with vulnerable counties and their major cities to be more informed about their responses to the crisis.
Some communities acted quickly, forming interdepartmental execution teams to address the housing and fitness desires of their homeless people, obtaining emergency housing, such as hotels, trailers and even conference centers, and taking care to prevent the spread of the network. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, for example, a 100-bed emergency isolation shelter was built in just 3 weeks. On March 11, oceanside, California police distributed fact sheets to other homeless people to inform them of the spread of the new coronavirus that caused COVID-19.
Others were slow or unresponsed. The city director of Sanger, California, objected to housing other potentially inflamed homeless people with COVID-19 in emergency caravans in his city. And in Daytona Beach, Florida, efforts to turn old construction into permanent housing for homeless citizens have failed despite and do the county’s investment.
In general, the archives showed that localities faced two major disorders in dealing with the effect of the pandemic on their homeless populations: lack of preparation for paintings in departments dealing with housing and health, and inadequate knowledge and evidence to locate who was in poor health and where.
Many criticized the federal government for not providing a coordinated reaction to the effect of the pandemic on the homeless, as well as more resources for testing and testing. Some also advocated racially equitable reactions to COVID-19. In early August, other people of color, who account for about 24% of the general population, accounted for approximately 61% of all COVID-19 infections and 50% of all deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. .
“All states have been deprived in their reaction to C-19 because the federal government has failed to adopt a unified national strategy. The director of the National Health Care Council for the Homeless, said in an email: “This is the least effective and the least expensive way to deal with a crisis.
A week before the CARES Act was passed on March 27, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA and Boston University published a report on infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 among the homeless. They estimated that more than 20,000 homeless people may require hospitalization and resulted in a variety of possible deaths, with a midpoint of around 3,400.
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“We thought the true final outcomes of the deaths would probably be the most sensitive of this range, given the challenge of taking homeless clients to the hospital, especially when they are not housed, and the unusually high death threat among the homeless population. Researchers wrote and estimated that $11.5 billion was needed to provide more beds and housing for social move.
Dan Treglia, one of Penn’s researchers, said he kept the study’s forecasts. Like other experts interviewed through the Howard Center, he noted that there is no country-wide screening regime, which adds to homeless people. Without such tests, the infection rate of the virus remains unknown, making COVID-19 deaths more difficult to identify and count.
The virus “affects other parts of the country at other times and with other severity rates,” Treglia said, adding that it’s hard to know “exactly what that number will look like at the end of the day.”
HUD’s homeless management information system enables the department, through a network of regional and local planning agencies, to track COVID-19 infections and deaths among the homeless. But HUD announced last March that it would not require the collection of knowledge on COVID-19 through HMIS, provided recommendations on what data communities could collect if they wished.
Experts say this highlights one of the structural aspects facing the country with homelessness.
“HUD is for housing, so they don’t think about physical care and other people on the ground; even service providers who serve their patients in their housing systems don’t focus on fitness,” said Bobby Watts, Executive Director of National Health Care for homeless council. But, he added, “housing is good shape.”
New York City, which has the largest population of homeless people and others in the country due to a right-to-housing law, is the only metropolitan domain that has attempted a statistical assessment of the effects of COVID on homeless people. The Homeless Coalition, the administrator appointed through the city’s Homeless Families and Homes Tribunal, reported that the age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rate for other protected homeless people was 67% higher than the mortality rate of the city’s general population in early August. . Array The city reported 104 deaths among its nearly 80,000 homeless citizens during the same period.
Boston tested an organization of other homeless people after a large-scale outbreak at a shelter last March. Of 408 citizens examined, researchers discovered a positivity rate of 36%, a measure of viral spread. Of these, approximately 88% were asymptomatic. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that COVID-19 carriers would possibly be asymptomatic.
Los Angeles, which together with New York, accounts for about a quarter of the country’s homeless population, began measuring the effects of COVID on their maximum vulnerability in April. California has the largest homeless population in the country.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said that as of August 7, it had assessed about 30% of its nearly 60,000 homeless citizens and discovered a 2.8% positivity rate among other homeless people and a 2.4% positivity rate among those living homeless. The researchers noted that infection rates seem to decrease for other people living outdoors who do those living in shelters do not know why.
William Nicholas, director of the County Health Impact Assessment Center, said cuts in public investment in fitness for decades meant that many did not have the ability to track deaths or infections of other homeless people COVID-19.
The report submitted to Congress through the U.S. Interagency Council of Homelessness cited a low number of homeless infections and deaths, which he attributes to “early collaboration with federal agencies, frontline providers, and local authorities.” He also stated that “other homeless people have been tested on a broader basis and at rates particularly higher than those of the general public.” The report noted that the figures were provisional and could simply “increase slightly”.
Emily Mosites, senior adviser to the CDC on homelessness, told the Howard Center that the report contained some DATA from the CDC, “but we don’t have a very accurate account of the total number of cases, and we expect estimates to be underestimated “One of the reasons for this,” she said, “is that homelessness is not reflected in medical records.
In an interview with the Howard Center, Marbut, executive director of the Interagency Council on homelessness, said his organization, not HUD, is the most productive to gather COVID-19 knowledge of the homeless. He said the council is doing this through contacts with homeless shelters across the country.
Jeff Olivet, who has been investigating homelessness for 25 years, said: “It would be detrimental to assume that just because there have still been primary epidemics, there will be none.
After outbreaks at shelters in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta, the CDC advised that shelters consider testing all citizens and staff, but local government records show that this has not happened.
In Santa Barbara County, California, no other homeless person who was taken to the county emergency shelter was tested until April 15, according to records. A homeless program official called for widespread testing, but said no tests would be done on other asymptomatic people.
In Merced, California, the Department of Public Health sent nurses in mid-May to homeless camps to verify COVID-19 and provide counseling, according to records, but was unable to provide a remedy to those who tested positive.
Arizona’s largest county officials, Maricopa, were discussing how to put evidence into effect for their homeless citizens last March, according to records, even though a local nonprofit is already evaluating homeless people. A month later, testing remained a challenge for the county. By the first week of August, officials reported that 490 of the nearly 7,400 homeless people in the county had tested positive for COVID and nine had died.
“We flew in the dark, ” said Watts. “We don’t know if we make the most productive recommendation at any given time. And the only way to verify for the most productive recommendation is to have the most productive data.”
Andy Phelps, the homeless prevention and reaction coordinator in Colorado Springs, won countless emails in the first two weeks of March when the risk of COVID-19 hit his home.
The shelter operator reminded him that “other homeless people with limited or limited handwashing and who are already at risk of other diseases would likely be at increased risk of contracting the Corona virus. He then asked whether emergency shelter operations were still applicable at the time others spoke to Phelps about the increased desire for cleanliness and sought the recommendation of the Office of Emergency Management about others.
Phelps even had questions about how to ask questions: “Could the OEM make this application to the county or just you?” Or does one of us make it straight out? »
Eventually, Phelps sent an email to the Director of Public Health of El Paso County, proposing an assembly to discuss the reaction to the crisis.
“I have gained an increasing number of calls and emails from shelter providers in the city who are involved about the possible effect of the spread of the COVID-19 virus through the shelters,” Phelps wrote. “I don’t feel able to offer you recommendations beyond sending them a CDC website.”
The Howard Center has filed public records programs in the 43 counties that its research has known as the highest vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak, and HUD makes plans for agencies that oversee efforts for homeless people across the country, known as Continuums of Care. Responses to approximately part of the 140 requests for documents submitted provide a review of how some communities struggled to respond in the first 3 months of the crisis.
Following Phelps’ suggestion, El Paso County initiated interdepartmental meetings with representatives of its public homeless reaction and fitness teams, as well as with related nonprofits. In 3 weeks, the city established a 100-bed isolation center.
Several other communities, from Florida to Hawaii, have created teams of similar corridors to address the wishes of homeless people in the pandemic, incorporating combined apartments that did not paint in combination, such as housing, fitness and emergency services.
“One thing that kept me awake at night is how those who live in the camps and live homeless,” Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, executive director of the Indianapolis Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention, told city officials on March 13. Matrix “How do you quarantine someone who doesn’t have a house?”
Maricopa County had two main objectives: to reduce the threat among the most vulnerable homeless and to respond appropriately to people with symptoms or in search of isolation. Although interdepartmental coordination was successful, the county criticized for housing homeless people at 3 outdoor camps in downtown Phoenix, known as Lots.
Last July, when temperatures reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit, about 200 more people lived in about 170 spaces, according to Amy Schwabenlender, executive director of Human Services Campus, a nonprofit organization that provided the Lots. She said the general numbers were fluid because other people came and went regularly.
Oceanside, California, and Pasco County, Florida, were among several cities and counties that partnered with nonprofits to ensure their unsheltered populations had water, hand-washing stations, toilets and electricity to charge cellphones – all services that became nearly inaccessible after COVID’s mass closures.
California has implemented the Roomkey project, which aims to move other high-risk homeless people from overcrowded shelters and outdoor camps to safe, isolated environments, such as hotel rooms and motels. As of June 30, another 14,200 people had been housed under the state and federal emergency funds program.
Other cities, such as Las Vegas, San Diego and Santa Barbara, California, have turned conference centers and the best school gymnasiums into emergency shelters for the homeless giant enough to allow social estrangement.
San Diego opened its conference center as an emergency shelter, control site and food distribution center on April 1 and, as of early August, had received 2,780 homeless people. Internal records show that the city has spent about $2.8 million according to the month on the makeshift shelter and plans to end $3 million according to the month until the end of the year. Funds have also been allocated to ensure that when the center resumes general activities, homeless citizens will “be able to unload shelter and housing.”
Connecticut has been widely praised by homeless experts for its speed. In early March, the State Department of Housing reduced housing capacity by nearly 60% and placed other homeless people aged 60 and over in hotels, some of which were used as control sites. Of three hundred checks, only two homeless people tested positive, according to Steve DiLella, a Connecticut housing official who spoke in July in the virtual city corridor of Nationwide about how to end homelessness.
But not all efforts to safely house or test the homeless were welcomed, records showed.
In Daytona Beach, Florida, the leaders of two nonprofits applied for permission to turn an empty construction into a shelter that could be changed to a permanent one-bedroom home after the pandemic. Jeff White, ceo of Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless Inc., and some other nonprofit executive argued that using the COVID-19 budget to expand “permanent employment” was higher than paying for hotel rooms, which “basically burned money.” Array The allocation had funding, a quick and county schedule, according to records, however, the city’s deputy director was not encouraging.
White told Howard Center that he had never obtained a definitive reaction from city officials and went ahead with the plan.
“The response was a kind of misre answer saying that authorizations can be requested, but without really commenting on whether they would accept the project,” he said.
In Sanger, California, city administrator Tim Chapa opposed the installation of 3 emergency isolation trailers in his city to space out other homeless people with coVID-19 symptoms. The Fresno County Department of Public Health ordered Chapa to take the trailers, according to records, however, before they arrived, Chapa appealed to the city council. He said the city shelter “may not have the capacity to provide good enough medical services to KNOWn HOMELESS people at COVID,” he said in an email on April 17 to a county official. Chapa said the trailers would be larger in Fresno, where they ended up later in the day.
Leaders of El Centro, the main city in California Imperial County, have unsuccessfully sought the county’s help for a COVID-19 verification program.
“As for the homeless population, they (county officials) are not going to adopt anything unless there are positive effects on the population. They do no preventive activity,” Adriana Nava, director of network services at El Centro, wrote to colleagues. March 19.
As of June 22, there were 17 cases of coronavirus among the estimated 1,400 homeless people in Imperial County, adding one in a 10-person camp at a grocery store in Calexico. Internal emails show that county officials did not realize that the inflamed user lived in the camp until they were notified through a homeless service provider, who said others feared they would become ill. The county then examined the camp’s citizens and said they were all negative, according to records. In an email on June 22, Linsey Dale, an Imperial County spokeswoman, said it was the only camp the county had tested.
The Center’s fire chief, Kenneth Herbert, told the Howard Center that he had questions about the number of infections in homeless county.
“You look at that and you say there are only 17 positives, so my next query would be what’s your screening campaign, how many other people have you tried or tried to try?” Asked. “How can you be 17?”
In the first week of August, the county reported that 36 other homeless people had tested positive for COVID-19.
Local governments’ various responses to homeless care and the pandemic highlight the need for a coordinated federal approach, Howard Center experts said.
“We have gone from one county to another, from one town to another, to expand a public fitness reaction to anything comparable to Spanish flu in terms of contagion and possible lethality,” said Marc Dones, executive director of the National Innovation Service, a public policy organization focused on racial equity. “Getting out of your role, retiring from duty right now, is a basic abdication of the government’s goal.”
Five months after the start of the pandemic, statistics show that other people of color are disproportionately inflamed and die from COVID-19.
At the same time, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are disproportionately affected by the public fitness crisis: homelessness. These same teams represent approximately 65% of the country’s homeless population, according to HUD 2019’s annual homeless assessment report.
Experts interviewed through the Howard Center said structural racism is the root cause of any of the pests affecting other people of color.
“We just wouldn’t be homeless if we didn’t have the kind of structural racism we have,” Dones said, pointing out the barriers other people of color face in both affordable housing and fitness services. “Racism is one of the main, if not the main, reasons why there is homelessness in this country.”
Experts say that the main type of homelessness experienced in Latin American and indigenous communities is to double or triple into insufficient housing, which influences both the under-count and under-service of these communities, as well as the spread of COVID-19.
In a 2018 study, researchers in El Paso, Texas, found that homeless Latinos were underestimated in HUD statistics, which they attributed to the agency not counting other people who were marginalized, such as those doubling with others. or surf on a couch.
In its definition of homelessness, HUD believes that people over the age of 24 or younger living in marginal housing are homeless, these Americans do not register in HUD’s semi-annual counts. People over the age of 24 on the same stage are not considered homeless through HUD. The firm stated when it updated its definitions in 2011 that it excluded certain vulnerable populations.
Olivet, who wrote a report on racism and homelessness in 2018, said Latino homelessness was “hidden” because outreach facilities are not “culturally and linguistically competent.”
Experts characterize the maximum rates of COVID-19 and homelessness infections among minority populations in their likelihood of low-wage jobs. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that these staff were more likely to be from other people of color: less than 20% of blacks and about 16% of Latinos were able to paint the pandemic from home, compared to about 30% of white clothes.
People of color are no less apt than their white counterparts, Olivet said; on the contrary, they are placed in a less fitness career with insufficient physical attention.
“Therefore, it’s not just about them being physically sorry because they’re in poor physical shape, but also that they’re in poor physical shape because they don’t have access to physical care,” he says.
COVID’s disproportionate effect on other people of color coincided with a broader verbal exchange of race as Black Lives Matter and demonstrations against police brutality spread across the United States. considering how to integrate racial equity into the homeless and COVID-19 dollars are being spent.
One of the first options to take such an action is Tacoma, Washington, D.C., which aims to factor 45% of your coronavirus rental budget for families who identify as black or mestizas. In Pierce County, where Tacoma is located, blacks account for about 26% of the homeless population and about 6% of the general population.
Va Lecia Kellum, president of the St. Joseph Center, an organization designed in Los Angeles that provides housing opportunities and fitness services, said she would like to see approaches elsewhere.
“If we’re all in the same boat, we surely want to invest in our most vulnerable citizens,” Kellum said.
While they find tactics to protect, isolate and control one of the country’s most vulnerable populations, experts say a homeless crisis is looming.
“We are beginning to prepare for a massive infusion of others who are wasting their homes,” said Megan Hustings, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “We no longer had the resources for everyone who lost their homes before this crisis, and it’s just going to get worse.”
In 2019, there were 389549 shelter beds for approximately 568,000 homeless people, according to HUD. To combat the expected increase in homeless people, some experts are calling for more housing assistance and unemployment benefits, in addition to the continued ban on evictions.
Treglia, the Penn researcher who was one of the first to warn of an increasingly close homeless crisis amid COVID, said the reception capacity would not keep pace with the expected increases in the homeless and that this could have far-reaching effects.
“The worse the situation, the more infected the homeless are, the more precautionary measures they will have to take,” he said. “The more we disclose endangered populations or any population at risk of infection, the greater the threat to all.”
This article was produced through the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an initiative of the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of data industry leader and pioneer Roy W. Howard. For more information, see http://azpbs.org/covid-homeless.