Pandemic Ramps Up Risks for the Homeless

Walter Herres messaged me that one of the homeless men he had been helping in recent months had died. His name was John Simon Alice, and he died in a shelter from an upper respiratory ailment. He couldn’t breath, Herres said, but it didn’t appear to be from COVID-19—though he can’t be sure.

Nearly 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the United States over the last three months, and about 104,000 have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most epidemiologists believe the toll is much higher, because many who die at home or who have struggled with other ailments may not be included in the count.

Alice died without much attention. There was no obituary, nothing to commemorate the life lost. Herres, who works with the homeless in New Brunswick, New Jersey, home to Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers University, says this is common, that the homeless are more often shunted from one place to another than given shelter or assistance.

His organization, SHILO (Supporting Homeless Innovatively Loving Others), found Alice shelter. Alice was “long-term homeless,” Herres says, and left behind an ex-wife. He was a military veteran, but served time in jail, which prevented him from accessing his benefits. Not much else is known about him, Herres says. He had a bit of an accent, but Herres could only speculate on where he was from.

Alice, like many homeless people, lived his life somewhat anonymously, a ghostly presence more likely to be seen as a nuisance than as the natural outgrowth of an economic system that only values those who can create economic value for others. The homeless are, in many ways, the embodiment of Karl Marx’s surplus labor argument, men and women who serve little functional use to the economy.

This has become especially true during the current crisis. Nearly 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the United States over the last three months, and about 104,000 have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most epidemiologists believe the toll is much higher, because many who die at home or who have struggled with other ailments may not be included in the count.

The homeless fall into this gray area, as the science journal Nature reported on May 7. While there have been several well-publicized outbreaks in homeless shelters, tests of the homeless have been “rare and outbreaks are spreading below the radar.” 

This poses a threat not just to the 1.4 million people who use some kind of shelter or transitional housing each year, the journal says, but to the half million living on the streets on any given night. Testing deficiencies, the journal adds, threaten “the nation’s ability to curb COVID-19, because these communities can rapidly become the epicentres of new outbreaks that will spread.”

There’s no count nationally, but New York City had experienced 961 cases of the virus in its shelters as of May 15, according to testimony from the city’s Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks. And The New York Times reported a string of twenty-three deaths in New York shelters earlier in the pandemic.

Shelters have been limiting the numbers allowed to stay and charities have canceled meals.

The San Francisco Chronicle has reported a large increase in deaths of homeless residents since the pandemic began, but officials say the numbers may be only tangentially related to the virus. “Drug overdoses, underlying medical conditions and a disruption to shelter and services due to the coronavirus pandemic,” have each contributed to a jump in cases, although, the paper highlighted, it’s “not clear how many people were posthumously tested for the virus.”

What has complicated issues, says Tristia Bauman, senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, is that many of the places frequented by the homeless became unavailable.

“Once the pandemic started,” she says, “a number of things happened, including closures of a lot of public places and private businesses” that the homeless used to rely on for respite. A McDonald’s or Starbucks is “someplace where you can spend some time inside,” she said, as is a public library. 

Libraries, she adds, are among the few places homeless people can visit during the day to get shelter, some air conditioning or heat, a bathroom, running water and, “critically, a computer.”

Bauman says some homeless people have phones, but most lack smartphones and access to a computer is a lifeline, a connection to family, to news, and to work.

“When that information portal is cut off from people, they’re not able to get the best information about how to protect themselves from COVID-19, and what the new policies are with respect to that,” she says.

Beyond that, shelters have been limiting the numbers allowed to stay and charities have canceled meals.

“That type of situation creates a world where people who have very few options for resources had even fewer options as a result of shelter in place orders,” Bauman says. “Since the pandemic hit, they have really struggled to find places to go to the bathroom and to wash their hands, and we know that washing hands is so critical to preventing spread of the disease.”

Hayden Renato of Oakland, a twenty-year-old who has been homeless, said most of the unhoused find themselves in a Catch-22 situation, in which they are hassled for not having masks or identification, but then can’t get what they’re being hassled for lacking.

“A lot of them will get harassed by cops and security guards for not wearing masks,” he said. “You can’t walk into a store without a mask. So, even if these people, even if they do have a little bit of money, they can’t go get food, or they can’t go to get their IDs or any public service.”

Many of the organizations and government agencies that provide assistance with food or other services require identification or are not open. And while the California Division of Motor Vehicles has reopened, it is by appointment only and it has been overstrained.

That means “some people who need IDs to be able to get services during the pandemic can’t get an ID until after the pandemic is over,” he said.

The homeless also face a lack of restrooms and hand-washing stations, Renato says, which creates sanitary issues and leaves them vulnerable to COVID-19 and other ailments. 

“The closest thing to a public restroom you might find is a PortaPotty every once in awhile,” he says, “or you have to take the ferry across from Oakland to San Francisco where they have public restrooms for homeless people on almost every street corner.”

Cory Stephen Penn, an activist in Oakland who has lived through bouts of homelessness himself, says a lot of the people he encounters do not have a “sense of urgency.” For many, “there are other pressing matters they are dealing with,” like protecting their few belongings or figuring out how to address their immediate needs.

“They take it seriously upon being notified,” he says. “They are more conscious about it.”

He says many of the homeless people he knows do shelter in place. They are “following it to a tee.”

Even where shelters are open, they can be less than adequate during normal times and downright dangerous now.

“They don’t go any farther than a 10-block radius,” Penn explains. “And it’s just to handle all the business they need to be handling, getting the necessities they need. Then they come back to their area where they have their shelter set up.”

“They’re not wandering the streets,” he adds. “They’re in their hut or tent or sitting next to it . ”

Reverend Steve Brigham, who works with homeless in Monmouth and Ocean counties in New Jersey, says many of the unhoused just add this new threat to the panoply of threats they already face. Many just chalk the difficulties up to their already difficult life, he says. They already live with a variety of symptoms, and may be fearful of engaging with authorities, so they live through it.

“I’ve heard of people that have gotten the virus,” he says, “they’ve tested positive, but haven’t really had too many symptoms. It could be the case [that]the homeless are just used to not feeling too well sometimes. It just wasn’t too much out of the normal for them and they went through the thing and didn’t even realize they had it.”

He knows of two homeless men who died in the last month—one from a fall and the other from a seizure. The deaths are tragic,  but  other homeless people “kind of  roll with the punches,” he says.  “They get used to this type of situation. So the pandemic, maybe it’s a lack of food, but besides that, [it] really hasn’t affected the homeless that much.”

Advocates like Herres say that more testing isn’t all that’s needed. Homeless individuals need more housing and support services than are being provided, and that existing structures that have been abandoned or left vacant could be used to house people at least temporarily.

“Hand washing centers and a dignity center are only bandaids,” he says, adding that far more needs to be done.

Some cities are providing hotel rooms, but that is a temporary measure and does not really address the need. For many, the street is their best option, Bauman says, even if “there is no physical barrier between the person and passersby or other unhoused people, and because of how COVID-19 is transmitted from person to person that really elevates the risk of disease transmission.”

Even where shelters are open, they can be less than adequate during normal times and downright dangerous now.

“A lot of times, shelters are crowded facilities,” she says. “Shelters want to get as many people in them as possible. but because of the nature of COVID-19 as well as some other communicable diseases, people who are in really close proximity with one another are at higher risk of either transmitting the disease or catching the disease.”

This can make them dangerous environments both for the unhoused and shelter employees. That’s what happened in a San Francisco shelter, she says, when two positive tests grew over a period of five days to nearly 100 cases.

Renato now lives in an Oakland shelter as part of a two-year transitional program. He’s grateful for the housing, but also concerned.

“On the street, it’s easier to stay away from other people than it is inside of the shelter,” he says. “In the shelter, you’re closer together with other people. Like when you’re out on the street, you can walk away from somebody. But when you’re sleeping in close quarters, it makes it difficult, and when you’re eating in close quarters—so it’s like everybody’s really hyper-vigilant in here.”