- 24 Apr 2020 19:41
#15086720
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to go on, the homeless are suffering the most.
With few people on the streets, there are fewer people to give them food or money. Many charities that provided food and services to the homeless have closed, due to health and safety reasons. Most fastfood restaurants where the homeless could buy a cheap hot meal will not sell to customers unless they are inside a car at the drive-through window. Coffee shops and libraries are closed, so the homeless can not loiter there. And of course shelters are not a safe place to be right now, due to the risk of disease spread. (Indeed many shelters have temporarily closed)
To make matters worse, some low wage workers have lost their jobs and are newly finding themselves homeless.
>>
As the coronavirus spreads, unhoused people are among the most vulnerable to infection.
Covid-19 outbreak continues, the challenges they face have only gotten more extreme. Shelters are full, or closed, or too fraught with coronavirus risk to consider sleeping in. They have no access to toilets, much less toilet paper. They’ve been laid off, and there’s nobody on the street so they can’t even panhandle. Common places to find shelter and a bathroom—libraries, gyms, fast food restaurants—are closed. Soup kitchens are closing, out of food, out of workers.
For everyone else this is "quarantine and chill". When you're homeless there is no quarantine, or chill. Unless you're the type that is comfortable laying on the ground in public.
Homelessness is incompatible with health. Experts like Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who studies homelessness, have been saying so for decades, but, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it's never been truer. “It’s a calamity. It’s our worst nightmare,” Kushel says. “It’s an enormous crisis superimposed on an existing crisis.” Unhoused people are already among the most sick in society, and now they’re physically incapable of following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most basic virus-fighting directive: stay home.
It’s nearly impossible for homeless people to maintain social distance. Their needs are met en masse. The CDC recommends 110 square feet per person for people housed together during the outbreak. Most homeless shelters simply don’t have that kind of space. “There has always been an increased risk of communicable diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and influenza,” Kushel says. Covid-19 is just the newest addition to the list. Some shelters are rearranging the furniture to house people farther apart, but those adjustments inevitably mean fewer beds, leaving more people outdoors. In Las Vegas, people are sleeping in parking lots, confined to white painted rectangles spaced six feet apart.
Even before the outbreak, many homeless people were left totally unsheltered. In California, where Governor Gavin Newsom estimates some 60,000 homeless people could end up infected with coronavirus, two thirds of the unhoused population lives outdoors, which is about twice the national average. Unsheltered people still rely on congregate settings to meet their basic needs, like food and hygiene, though the latter often goes unmet. “These mass feeding events, they have very good intentions, but they often don’t think about the public health side of things,” says Drew Capone, a water sanitation and hygiene researcher at Georgia Tech. “We saw in our research in Atlanta that most open defecation happens within 400 feet of a soup kitchen. Not a lot of hand washing goes on. They’re not opening toilets to folks.” According to a Reddit user who wished to remain anonymous, “Having nowhere to poop is the worst part.”
The conditions of homelessness would leave a healthy person vulnerable to catching a disease like Covid-19, and unhoused people tend not to be healthy. Your first needs are finding food and a place to sleep. Healthful behaviors come next. In addition to not being able to maintain good hygiene or a good diet, unhoused people disproportionately suffer from lung disease, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer, which are all risk factors for experiencing Covid-19’s more severe and deadly symptoms. Being exposed to the cold at night makes the lungs more susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, let alone someone like Covid-19. Homeless also tend to be older: Half are 50 years old and up. They also age prematurely. If they're 50, physiologically, medically, their bodies act more like they’re 70 or 80 because of the unique issues and difficulties of being homeless.
<<
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus ... -homeless/
>>
While cases of the new coronavirus skyrocket across the United States, especially in hotspots like New Orleans and New York City, government leaders and public health officials repeat a new national refrain: “Stay home.” The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued clear guidance that in order to “flatten the curve,” or reduce the national caseload to prevent overwhelming hospital capacity, Americans must practice social distancing and stay at home as much as possible. But for the approximately 550,000 homeless persons in the United States, the spread of Covid-19 presents a uniquely grave threat. For these people, calls to remain home are impossible to heed.
According to The New York Times, “the largest homeless population in the country” can be found in New York City, where there are now nearly 52,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. <<
https://www.americamagazine.org/politic ... -continues
One other issue to mention, laundromats are closed. So homeless people will not have anywhere to be able to wash their clothes.
The apartments around here all have locks on their laundry rooms.
I can't imagine how homeless people were getting by with the disappearance of toilet paper from store shelves.
Homeless people don't exactly have a place to store large amounts of toilet paper.
Imagine a homeless guy who only has one roll of toilet paper in his pack. He heads to the store, they're all out. He walks to another supermarket. They are out too. He walks to all the stores on foot (not an easy thing, carrying his big heavy pack of belongings around with him). None of them have toilet paper, he finds out.
Many public restroom areas are closed too, so they can't steal the toilet paper from there. Or if they did find a rare public restroom area that was open, some other homeless person had probably stolen all the paper on the roll.
You can't use the restrooms in restaurants right now, since they are take-out only.
One other thing that makes the homeless situation more difficult where I live is that half the stores have stopped accepting cash and take only debit and credit. This means that less peolpe have spare change to donate to the needy and even if you give them some, they have a hell of a time finding somewhere to spend it. We have a guy who used to come twice a month to collect our empty refundable bottles and cans, but stores also stopped taking those also.
I recently talked to a homeless man who said he had not eaten in 3 days. Apparently many people who, in normal times, might otherwise have given them some money or food, are now reluctant to approach a homeless person, due to fear of catching the coronavirus. (Especially if the person looks dirty or dingy, there's a subconscious connection to disease) And the homeless are probably much more likely to catch the coronavirus, due to their situation.
Some homeless do not have access to clean safe drinking water, with so many places closed. (When you're homeless, it's kind of hard to carry much water around with you, due to the weight) Many of the homeless I saw seemed to be drinking most of their fluids in the form of overpriced soda purchased from convenience stores, since the big supermarkets were too far away and outside walking distance for them. (Especially with some of them being in poor health, or having to carry around heavy packs of their belongings)
I distributed some gallon containers of water to them, but those may be too heavy for them to carry around. For those camped out, apparently it's difficult for many of them to walk back and forth from the areas where they sleep and stash their belongings, and the areas where they panhandle. The homeless must be in desperate situation because there seems to be more of them out than usual. Some waiting out there all day and not getting anything.
With people so worried about their own wellbeing (both economic and health), they are less inclined towards caring about other people in need.
It's mostly sort of a natural psychological response. People feeling fear are less generous.
With few people on the streets, there are fewer people to give them food or money. Many charities that provided food and services to the homeless have closed, due to health and safety reasons. Most fastfood restaurants where the homeless could buy a cheap hot meal will not sell to customers unless they are inside a car at the drive-through window. Coffee shops and libraries are closed, so the homeless can not loiter there. And of course shelters are not a safe place to be right now, due to the risk of disease spread. (Indeed many shelters have temporarily closed)
To make matters worse, some low wage workers have lost their jobs and are newly finding themselves homeless.
>>
As the coronavirus spreads, unhoused people are among the most vulnerable to infection.
Covid-19 outbreak continues, the challenges they face have only gotten more extreme. Shelters are full, or closed, or too fraught with coronavirus risk to consider sleeping in. They have no access to toilets, much less toilet paper. They’ve been laid off, and there’s nobody on the street so they can’t even panhandle. Common places to find shelter and a bathroom—libraries, gyms, fast food restaurants—are closed. Soup kitchens are closing, out of food, out of workers.
For everyone else this is "quarantine and chill". When you're homeless there is no quarantine, or chill. Unless you're the type that is comfortable laying on the ground in public.
Homelessness is incompatible with health. Experts like Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who studies homelessness, have been saying so for decades, but, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it's never been truer. “It’s a calamity. It’s our worst nightmare,” Kushel says. “It’s an enormous crisis superimposed on an existing crisis.” Unhoused people are already among the most sick in society, and now they’re physically incapable of following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most basic virus-fighting directive: stay home.
It’s nearly impossible for homeless people to maintain social distance. Their needs are met en masse. The CDC recommends 110 square feet per person for people housed together during the outbreak. Most homeless shelters simply don’t have that kind of space. “There has always been an increased risk of communicable diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and influenza,” Kushel says. Covid-19 is just the newest addition to the list. Some shelters are rearranging the furniture to house people farther apart, but those adjustments inevitably mean fewer beds, leaving more people outdoors. In Las Vegas, people are sleeping in parking lots, confined to white painted rectangles spaced six feet apart.
Even before the outbreak, many homeless people were left totally unsheltered. In California, where Governor Gavin Newsom estimates some 60,000 homeless people could end up infected with coronavirus, two thirds of the unhoused population lives outdoors, which is about twice the national average. Unsheltered people still rely on congregate settings to meet their basic needs, like food and hygiene, though the latter often goes unmet. “These mass feeding events, they have very good intentions, but they often don’t think about the public health side of things,” says Drew Capone, a water sanitation and hygiene researcher at Georgia Tech. “We saw in our research in Atlanta that most open defecation happens within 400 feet of a soup kitchen. Not a lot of hand washing goes on. They’re not opening toilets to folks.” According to a Reddit user who wished to remain anonymous, “Having nowhere to poop is the worst part.”
The conditions of homelessness would leave a healthy person vulnerable to catching a disease like Covid-19, and unhoused people tend not to be healthy. Your first needs are finding food and a place to sleep. Healthful behaviors come next. In addition to not being able to maintain good hygiene or a good diet, unhoused people disproportionately suffer from lung disease, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer, which are all risk factors for experiencing Covid-19’s more severe and deadly symptoms. Being exposed to the cold at night makes the lungs more susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, let alone someone like Covid-19. Homeless also tend to be older: Half are 50 years old and up. They also age prematurely. If they're 50, physiologically, medically, their bodies act more like they’re 70 or 80 because of the unique issues and difficulties of being homeless.
<<
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus ... -homeless/
>>
While cases of the new coronavirus skyrocket across the United States, especially in hotspots like New Orleans and New York City, government leaders and public health officials repeat a new national refrain: “Stay home.” The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued clear guidance that in order to “flatten the curve,” or reduce the national caseload to prevent overwhelming hospital capacity, Americans must practice social distancing and stay at home as much as possible. But for the approximately 550,000 homeless persons in the United States, the spread of Covid-19 presents a uniquely grave threat. For these people, calls to remain home are impossible to heed.
According to The New York Times, “the largest homeless population in the country” can be found in New York City, where there are now nearly 52,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. <<
https://www.americamagazine.org/politic ... -continues
One other issue to mention, laundromats are closed. So homeless people will not have anywhere to be able to wash their clothes.
The apartments around here all have locks on their laundry rooms.
I can't imagine how homeless people were getting by with the disappearance of toilet paper from store shelves.
Homeless people don't exactly have a place to store large amounts of toilet paper.
Imagine a homeless guy who only has one roll of toilet paper in his pack. He heads to the store, they're all out. He walks to another supermarket. They are out too. He walks to all the stores on foot (not an easy thing, carrying his big heavy pack of belongings around with him). None of them have toilet paper, he finds out.
Many public restroom areas are closed too, so they can't steal the toilet paper from there. Or if they did find a rare public restroom area that was open, some other homeless person had probably stolen all the paper on the roll.
You can't use the restrooms in restaurants right now, since they are take-out only.
One other thing that makes the homeless situation more difficult where I live is that half the stores have stopped accepting cash and take only debit and credit. This means that less peolpe have spare change to donate to the needy and even if you give them some, they have a hell of a time finding somewhere to spend it. We have a guy who used to come twice a month to collect our empty refundable bottles and cans, but stores also stopped taking those also.
I recently talked to a homeless man who said he had not eaten in 3 days. Apparently many people who, in normal times, might otherwise have given them some money or food, are now reluctant to approach a homeless person, due to fear of catching the coronavirus. (Especially if the person looks dirty or dingy, there's a subconscious connection to disease) And the homeless are probably much more likely to catch the coronavirus, due to their situation.
Some homeless do not have access to clean safe drinking water, with so many places closed. (When you're homeless, it's kind of hard to carry much water around with you, due to the weight) Many of the homeless I saw seemed to be drinking most of their fluids in the form of overpriced soda purchased from convenience stores, since the big supermarkets were too far away and outside walking distance for them. (Especially with some of them being in poor health, or having to carry around heavy packs of their belongings)
I distributed some gallon containers of water to them, but those may be too heavy for them to carry around. For those camped out, apparently it's difficult for many of them to walk back and forth from the areas where they sleep and stash their belongings, and the areas where they panhandle. The homeless must be in desperate situation because there seems to be more of them out than usual. Some waiting out there all day and not getting anything.
With people so worried about their own wellbeing (both economic and health), they are less inclined towards caring about other people in need.
It's mostly sort of a natural psychological response. People feeling fear are less generous.
- By ingliz
- By Potemkin