MIAMI, FL – Just days after Easter and Jewish Passover, Ronald L.Book won a call on a Saturday morning telling him that a 26-year-old man had the first homeless user to die of coronavirus in the Miami area.
“I literally cried for two days,” said Book, who chairs the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, in an interview with Patch. “We crossed — I don’t know, like six weeks, seven — we hadn’t lost any life. I don’t even think we had three people at the time, four in hospitals.”
The homeless man, who lived at chapman South Homeless Assistance Center, a haven on an outdoor rural farm in Miami that borders the Florida Everglades, visited the facility’s fitness clinic with a fever on April 17. He was taken by ambulance to Jackson South Medical Center. Kendall on the same day.
“Five, six hours later, he died,” Book said. “I had reached a point where I became convinced that we were going to save everyone, without wasting lives.”
Since then, there have been three other deaths among Miami’s homeless population, adding two other people who have taken refuge in the same facility. But if Miami had followed the delight of other American cities, there could have been many more deaths.
“In the first few weeks, it’s not unusual to read outdoor stories from New York and California about this homeless shelter and that, another 70 people are hospitalized today in a singles shelter, the next day 40 other people, the next day 60 other people,” Book said.
3% Positivity
New insights gathered through the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, which manages public investment for 20 organizations that paint with homeless people in Miami, show that Miami’s homeless population and the three hundred employees who paint directly with them have had only a 3% infection rate since. April 1 founded on 3,400 tests to date.
In other words, while Florida’s most populous county of 2.8 million other people is struggling to take control of a positivity rate that rarely rises around 15-20%, some of the other people at peak risk, others who do not have a position to wash. during the day – look much larger than the average Miami-Dade resident.
Officials will be conducting tests and retests on 700 shelter residents and staff at three emergency shelters with nasal swabs provided to the Homeless Trust through the Florida Department of Emergency Management. The test results will be provided by the Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade in the coming days.
The state of Florida’s mobile COVID-19 testing unit already conducted more than 400 tests on July 15, which confirmed the low positivity rate.
The tests were also conducted through the Lazarus Project, which targeted others not concerned with a serious intellectual illness who are among the most service-resistant. Miami Fire Rescue conducted other tests, as did Camillus Health Concern and Community Health of South Florida.
Book said his organization had rejected the use of evidence from the beginning, which he said would have produced too many false negatives.
“I took a lot of crap with other people because I didn’t need to take the checks,” Book recalls. “A check that throws false negatives is a useless check.”
People who tested positive for coronavirus were moved to one of five sites designated as legal space, adding the Dunns Josephine Hotel, a traditionally black hotel in Miami’s Overtown segment, which thanked the advertising opportunity.
He doesn’t criticize
Despite the good luck of the check numbers in Miami, the procedure was not without criticism. Dream Defenders has organized several occasions in Miami to advocate for wider use of hotel rooms due to the pandemic.
Many other homeless people have refused to move to shelters or hotels, according to confidence. The organization’s strategy to take the most vulnerable people off the streets and protect them.
Samantha Batko, a senior associate of studies at the Metropolitan Housing and Policy Communities Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., told Patch that it would be complicated to use hotels and other bureaucracy of transitional housing once the existing fitness crisis has passed.
A lot of do things similar to Miami, he said. “They in decentralizing or decentralizing their shelters. They in making sure to isolate other people who get sick. They in isolating others who would possibly be in vulnerable populations in COVID-19.”
She highlighted the Roomkey Project in California and an effort in Austin, Texas, to get others out of pandemic shelters while encouraging other homeless people to get tested for the virus.
“The number of hotel and motel rooms that are being used in jurisdictions are dwarfed by the overall number of people who are experiencing homelessness,” Batko cautioned.
The challenge of homelessness will worsen after the pandemic, he said. More Americans risk becoming homeless once moratoriums on evictions are lifted across the country.
I never imagined on the streets
At 63, William Renfroe was not homeless and filed for bankruptcy. She said she fell in difficult times just over two years ago when she vacationed from Miami to Richmond, Virginia, with her friend Joyce. He suffered a medical emergency and never returned.
He began to say that he was not feeling well and then dropped to the ground in the middle of the sentence. “She went to the hospital and three hours later she was no longer with me,” she recalls. “He died at the end of 2018: two years, one month and six days.”
He developed a central disease and fought diabetes, his diabetes is now under control, but it hasn’t been the same since Joyce’s death.
Unable to pay the rent without his salary, he evicted him and became homeless.
“I stole the third night, ” he said. “The only thing I haven’t lost is my cell phone.”
He said he had tried to stand several times since then and had even got a 38-hour-a-week task at Hotel W on Brickell Avenue in Miami before being fired when the pandemic wiped out 90% of the hotels. . Occupation.
“I got my clothes. I got my shoes,” he said. “If you’re going to get out and do this, you’ve got to look the part …. You can’t go in wearing a pair of ragged up nasty shoes you got on the street.”
I had an advance on a task that would pay $15 an hour as an electrician’s assistant, but I wasn’t sure you could stay at the hotel if you had to stop by to paint every day outside the hotel, which could put others threatened by the virus. It will take time to save for an apartment, even if you have homework.
“Most of the time, they need damage from the first month, damage of two months,” he said of the Miami rental market. “I’m looking to get into those old-man stalls, but the trash cans come out. You’re not 65.”
Early in his life, he spent 26 years working at the American Rolling Mill Company in Ashland, Kentucky, before his task was eliminated through a replacement in the metal production process.
Since the pandemic, Renfroe has stated that it has been tested 3 times for coronavirus and that the effects are negative.
Life on the street can be bleak and many other people lose hope and commit suicide out of desperation.
“When you’re homeless, not tomorrow. You don’t see anything blind,” he said. “No one’s helping you. Politicians talk, but that’s what it is: talking.”
Finally, she fears having to leave the Dunns Josephine hotel even though she has not yet found a job.
“Everyone is afraid of the coronavirus. I’m 63 years old. What’s the difference between dying of coronavirus or dying in ruin, or going back to the street and getting sick?”, he asked. “These other people here are great. They’re super cool. At the end of the day, I’ll pass anyway. The cash will run out.”
U.S. Surgeon General Visits Miami
The Miami-Dade Homeless Trust eBook spoke to U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams on his recent stopover in Miami and was asked about the low rate of positivity among Miami homeless people. Miami-Dade is thought to be the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in Florida with 132,461 positive cases and 1865 deaths.
“I wanted to perceive how we controlled to keep that point low,” Book said. “It’s about the communication and the appearance of other people we love.”
Batko, of the Urban Institute, said early reports from Boston and San Francisco revealed much higher rates of positivity at homeless shelters than reported in the Miami area.
“The one who gained top notoriety, the one who came here from Boston, showed that the spread in shelters was very immediate and incredibly widespread,” he said. “More than a third of people in the collective shelter tested positive.”
In San Francisco, a shelter discovered a positivity rate of about 25%. “They did a circular moment of testing even after doing a little decentralization and putting other people in hotels, and they found that about 60% of other people had it,” he says.
Despite these daunting statistics, Batko said, she is aware of the jurisdiction she has performed very well but has not yet published her findings.
“I’ve had conversations with a jurisdiction that has made a separate effort to verify a giant component of its unregistered population, and they haven’t discovered any COVID-19 instances,” he said, refusing to identify jurisdiction, to say yes. a lot of homeless people living outside.
A growing number of homeless seniors
One of the most demanding situations facing homeless organizations in Miami and other U.S. cities Even before the pandemic was how to manage the developing population of older people who can’t afford market rent.
“The homeless population has aged a little for some time,” Batko said. “It’s not that other people who are already homeless, however, it turns out that there is a cohort of other people born in the same decade who have remained at a higher point of vulnerability to homelessness as they age.
He said many of those other people in the United States experienced homelessness for the first time.
“People have attached the power to painting in a marginal way, without even having a foot in the strength of painting,” he said. “As they were given more age, they maintained stability by being able to paint enough hours, have wives, maintain ties with their families, but as they were given older, their wife may have died or their wife has died, or they are no longer able to paint in the industry, if it were a heavy-duty industry, or their industry has disappeared.”
Some 165 seniors living in shelters in the Miami domain were transferred to hotels and other amenities under contracts with Homeless Trust. They were joined by two hundred other elderly people living on the street, according to Book.
“We’ve had a real challenge with older people over the last 20 months,” Book says. “We have other seniors in our shelters for 900 days, 1, 100 days, 1200 days. There’s something about that. No, it’s okay. No, it’s okay. It’s wrong, and we’re trying very hard to fix it, adding run to get a construction in which you only have room for 75 to a hundred (other people).”
Displacement of others most threatened with coronavirus
During the pandemic, the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust placed 847 people, adding seniors and others at increased risk of contracting the virus, in hotel rooms and in a rented service called Mia Casa in North Miami.
“We were testing them and provided them with a hotel room. Even those who didn’t need to take the test, we presented hotel rooms,” Book recalls. “Then we started to space out the underlying fitness problems in the hotels. We’re trying to force them all to pass the tests. Most of them have, some have not. Placement and quarantine are taken seriously.”
Some others had to be evicted from hotels if they threatened others through their actions, according to Book.
“You can’t just come and go, come and go, as you wish,” Book explained. “We have to send a message. You had to have discipline.”
Part of this field is to make other homeless people perceive that they had to use hand or hand sanitizer at least once an hour. They were given hand sanitizers, as well as sanitary wipes, as well as leaflets that reminded them of what to do to survive.
“If you touch the ground. If you hit a wall. If you touch a railing. If you hit a bank, they have to wash within that hour,” Book said. “I was frustrated with the mask because I don’t really think I ever completely convinced people on the street to fully settle for the importance of masks. But they used them. They just didn’t use them as much as I did. liked it.”
He helped call the convention
Another key detail of Miami’s pandemic strategy has been the organization of near-convention calls between the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust and its spouse organizations.
Because accepting as true is guilty of allocating funds, it has the influence to get homeless organizations to adhere to the same rules.
“I fund your programs. They were incredibly cooperative and helpful the first few weeks, for many weeks,” Book said. “We were in uncharted territory. None of us knew then what we know now. We knew we were going to have other people in and out of the shelters that day.
“We can’t let them in simply because you don’t know who they were in contact with,” he said. “If the message about cutting off the spread, then you had to know when they came back here every day: Who did you see? Who did you touch? Who did you contact? Were you dressed in a mask? Distancing yourself socially? All those things that we literally evolve as we go along.”
Strategy Paid Off
Book stated that he was aware that the technique would bear fruit when a woman living at Lotus House worked on a cleaning team assigned to the K-8 Ruth K. Broad Bay Harbor Center, which closed in mid-March after a follow-up officer tested positive. . because of the virus.
“When he returned to Lotus House that night, last afternoon. Hey, where were you? What were you doing?” Well, I’m cleaning a school. “Where is this school?” Well, it’s Bay Harbor Elementary, ” recalls Book.” They knew they couldn’t let her in. That the day when we knew for sure, in those early stages, that the questions we were asking, and that our suppliers were asking us, were working.
Mixed Blessing
Phillip Roundtree of Miami, 60, has tested negative for coronavirus more times than he can count. You are tested twice a week, each time you undergo chemotherapy for prostate cancer.
For him, the pandemic is a kind of combined blessing. Because of his health, he has to be very careful to avoid the virus, but without the highest prevalence of the disease in Miami, he may not have gotten a room at the Dunns Josephine hotel three months ago.
“Homelessness is the number one killer,” he said. “The coronavirus, when it hit here, for me, is not a bad thing because somehow, and somehow, it helped me. If it wasn’t for the coronavirus, I’d probably be on the street somewhere. Array”.
At one point, he was in the army, but only a few months before he was diagnosed with hemorrhagic ulcers. Later in life, he struggled with cocaine addiction.
“I grew up here all my life,” he said. “I left the state of Florida.”
Surprisingly, he says, he comes from a rich circle of family members and has worked as a cook, security assistant and nurse.
“I’ve never been homeless one day in my life,” he said of his family. “Everyone succeeds. I call them all the time. I have six sisters and a brother, one is very successful. I call them because I need hope, to share their lives with me. But they never call me. I have 3 adult children. They never call me.”
When the old comes back
Book said there will come a day when life will return to the old homeless general who have had the chance to triumph over the pandemic in a hostel, a hotel room or Mia Casa.
“Let’s face it, if COVID leaves in the morning, no one deserves to think that I’m throwing other people out because I’m not,” Book insisted. “I will find a way to locate homes for many other people in a relatively short period of time.
“I don’t have a home for everyone right now, but I’m going to find it,” he said. “To anyone who needs to stay inside, I don’t expel him. It’s the opposite of who we are.”
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