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Officials brace for the coronavirus to hit homeless shelters, encampments

A small homeless encampment sits under a bride in Seattle. Officials in the Puget Sound region are bracing for the novel coronavirus to hit homeless shelters and camps.
Parker Miles Blohm
/
KNKX
A small homeless encampment sits under a bride in Seattle. Officials in the Puget Sound region are bracing for the novel coronavirus to hit homeless shelters and camps.

 

Officials across the Puget Sound region are bracing for the novel coronavirus to hit homeless shelters and encampments, where they say the virus could pose more of a threat than in the general population. 

Discussion of the virus is expected to dominate a meeting of service providers Friday in Pierce County, where cases have yet to be reported. 

Denny Hunthausen oversees four shelter sites for the nonprofit Catholic Community Services in the South Sound. In past years, he's dealt with outbreaks of the flu and hepatitis A in shelters, and said guests are at particular risk from infectious disease. 

“They’re not only in a mass congregant condition, where they’re living and being together without choice really, because this is their home day and night, many of them,” Hunthausen said. “But there’s a higher degree of people with chronic disease, and that makes them additionally vulnerable.” 

Hunthausen said his branch of Catholic Community Services only has three one-person rooms where people could be isolated, at the Nativity House shelter in Tacoma. The current plan, he said, is to provide masks to any shelter guests showing symptoms of COVID-19, the respiratory disease that's caused by the new strain of coronavirus.

Hunthausen said he’s also concerned infections among employees could create staffing problems at shelters.

“We’re caring for people,” he said. “This is their residence in these shelters, so we can’t close up shop just because we had a few sick staff. How are we going to staff those programs as this unfolds? And so we’re doing a lot of thinking and planning around that.”

In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan says the city will create room in tiny house villages for an additional 100 people. She says the villages are not expected to be isolation or quarantine sites, but the additional capacity is designed to move people out of encampments where the virus could spread more easily. 

“We know we need to take additional measures to bring more of our unsheltered community inside,” Durkan said Thursday in a news release. “Our neighbors experiencing homelessness are at greater risk of exposure to COVID-19.”

Over the next two to three weeks, new units will be added to the Lake Union Tiny House Village, New Cherry Hill Church Tiny House Village, and the former Evergreen Treatment Facility in the Bitter Lake neighborhood. 

Seattle and King County also are creating sites where people can recover from the virus in isolation if they don’t have access to a home. That includes people who are traveling and those who are homeless. 

The sites, which are expected to have room for 213 people, are in White Center, Kent, Interbay and North Seattle. 

No COVID-19 patients are currently occupying those sites, Durkan said Thursday.

 

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Will James is a former KNKX reporter and was part of the special projects team, reporting and producing podcasts such as Outsiders and The Walk Home.