COVID-19 spares homeless

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, there was concern the vulnerable homeless population could be affected more than others.

To date, that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

Dr. Albert de Villiers, Interior Health’s new chief medical health officer, said that it’s difficult to track those sort of statistics as people aren’t required to identify themselves as homeless during the testing process.

The initial concern around the homeless population was that it would be difficult for them to self-isolate, which would become a bigger problem were someone to become infected.

“If they don’t have a home, it’s an issue,” de Villiers said.

As a result, Interior Health has worked with municipalities to ensure there are spaces available where those infected among the homeless population can be isolated.

“To make sure we can actually put these people up somewhere so they don’t have to be out on the street any more,” de Villiers said.

When asked why the homeless communities in B.C. haven’t been hit as hard by COVID-19 as initially predicted, de Villiers speculated on some reasons.

De Villiers said it may be because homeless people tend to gather in smaller groups and generally stay outdoors.

“We know that’s one of the biggest things, being in close proximity to a bunch of people you don’t know,” he said.

There are similar findings in the United States, where researchers don’t know why there appears to be so few outbreaks among the homeless in a country that has surpassed five million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 169,000 deaths.

“I am shocked, I guess I can say, because it’s a very vulnerable population. I don’t know what we’re going to see in an aftermath,” said Dr. Deborah Borne, who oversees health policy for COVID-19 homeless response at San Francisco’s public health department.

“That’s why it’s called a novel virus, because we don’t know.”

About 200 of an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco have tested positive for the virus and half came from an outbreak at a homeless shelter in April. One homeless person is among the city’s 69 deaths.

In other places with large homeless populations, the numbers are similarly low. In King County, which includes Seattle, about 400 of an estimated 12,000 homeless residents have been diagnosed. In Los Angeles County, about 1,200 of an estimated 66,000 homeless people have been diagnosed.

It’s slightly higher in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, where nearly 500 of an estimated 7,400 homeless people have tested positive, including nine who have died.

In Interior Health, although testing now is primarily being done on a voluntary basis on those who are showing symptoms, de Villiers said the health authority can quickly update and increase testing sites if officials discover a sudden increase, or cluster, in a particular area.

This was the case in Kelowna recently, though those additional testing facilities have now closed.

De Villiers also said even those with minor symptoms are free to seek out testing for COVID-19.

“You don’t have to have full-blown symptoms,” he said.