For homeless, coronavirus guidelines can be ‘impossible’ Are your local officials prepared?

(3-7-20) Now is a good time to ask your local officials what they are doing to help the homeless avoid the virus?

With little access to hand-washing stations, shelter and medical care, homeless population may be hit especially hard, public health officials said this week. They’ve launched extra measure this week to help them.

Health officials have begun visiting the county’s 300-plus homeless and short-term shelters to ensure adequate measures are in place, and that there is access to medical providers, she said.

The public health department also issued a five-page guidance for homeless shelters that calls for ensuring a well-stocked hand-washing stations to be available all through the facility.

“They cannot stay home when they’re sick,” she said. “They cannot wash their hands, (or) often infrequently. And a lot of the times they do not have a medical provider that they are in contact with.”

She added that many people who are homeless tend to be “sicker than the general public and already have heightened mortality rates.”

“So we are very concerned that a novel coronavirus can disproportionately devastate people who are experiencing homelessness,” she said.

County officials on Wednesday declared a local and public health emergency in an effort to ensure resources are available if the illness spreads. On Thursday, health officials confirmed four additional cases of the illness, also known as COVID-19.

Ferrer is also meeting with the other departments and agencies, including the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and the county’s emergency management department, to discuss the best ways to quarantine and “house people who have mild illness, and don’t require hospitalization,” in the event there are cases among those who are homeless.

“We need to make sure that these are full service facilities where we can be prepared to allow people to heal and get better and allow their quarantine period in a safe and secure environment,” she said.

Another possibility is also to keep winter shelters open longer, she said.

“What we don’t want is a lot of people now going back to the streets when we could be facing a possible outbreak situation,” said Ferrer.

She said the county is also consulting with the state health department on the matter.

“This is a unique situation only to L.A. County, to be honest, in terms of the magnitude, but it’s something that we absolutely are going to need to be prepared to address and address very quickly.”

Los Angeles Council members Monica Rodriguez and Mitch O’Farrell on Wednesday introduced a motion requesting that emergency funding be used to install hygiene facilities at homeless encampments citywide.

It was unclear how many hygiene stations may be deployed, and how much they would cost. Mobile stations had been under discussions in recent years, particularly after a Hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles in 2017, with more than a dozen deployed across the city over the next two years.

Hygiene stations were recently also incorporated into the Los Angeles Sanitation Department’s encampment cleanup program last fall, and as of December, three mobile hygiene stations were deployed with the clean-ups, out of seven total that are expected to up and running by this year.

Rodriguez’s office has coordinated with the sanitation department, and homeless services agencies, and the state to address public health and housing needs faced by residents of an encampment in Pacoima, along Bradley Avenue. The encampment is visited by one of the sanitation department’s mobile hygiene stations.