Medical respite is short-term residential care for homeless people too ill or frail to recover on the streets, but not sick enough to be in a hospital. John Nacion/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Medical respite: A possible solution There is no data since the outbreak began, but early evidence suggests that the number of deaths is higher between June 2019 and June 2020.Ī former Radisson Hotel in New York City converted to a homeless shelter. The result is a detrimental and costly cycle for both patients and the health care system.Īnd the situation continues to deteriorate: Between July 2018 and June 2019, 404 of the city’s homeless died – 40% higher than the previous year and the largest year-over-year increase in a decade. Some inevitably wind up back in the hospital. Homeless patients discharged from hospitals or clinics who then go to drop-in centers, shelters or the street sometimes do not fully recover from their illnesses. So the question is: Where do homeless patients go to convalesce when discharged from acute medical care, especially in the post-COVID-19 era? That helped, but it was hardly a perfect situation. New York City responded by using almost 20% of its hotels as temporary shelter facilities, with one to two clients per room. While there is no reliable analogous data for other cities, what happens in New York can be a lesson for others.Īdd to that the inability to isolate, quarantine or physically distance the homeless from one another during COVID-19. In April alone, DHS reported 58 homeless deaths from COVID-19, 1.6 times higher than the overall city rate. As of May 31, the New York Department of Homeless Services had reported 926 confirmed COVID-19 cases across 179 shelter locations and 86 confirmed COVID-19 deaths. In 2019, the city’s annual count of hospital homeless shows more than 300 on any given night who are patients or using the hospital as temporary shelter.Īs a health care practitioner, educator and researcher in the field of public health and social epidemiology who works in the city, I’m fully aware of the challenges faced and the tragedies already seen. That’s not all of the city’s homeless, of course the 60,000-plus doesn’t include homeless people hidden within patient rolls and emergency department waiting rooms. But as the lockdown commenced in mid-March, the 60,923 homeless people staying at the city’s shelter system found themselves disproportionately affected by the pandemic. For New York City, even before COVID-19, 2020 was already turning out to be a record year for homelessness. While this number had been steadily decreasing since 2007, in the past two years it has started to increase. In 2019, about 567,715 homeless people were living in the United States.
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