Toronto’s shelter system is at a “boiling point,” advocates say, and is about to collapse.
Although the city is moving to expand capacity and provide shelter residents with better personal protective equipment (PPE) as cases rise, concerns remain that more needs to be done, and quickly.
While extremely cold weather this week increased the need, COVID-19 infections continued to reduce available staff. This convergence of challenges led to lost calls in shelter entry phone lines and a lack of bandwidth to provide adequate care to some infected residents, advocates told the Star.
The occupation of the shelters was full or near it all week, during which temperatures dropped to damaging and deadly depths. Indoors, infections spread: Shelters were ordered last week to keep infected residents indoors as isolation places no longer had space.
On Thursday, as Toronto shelters grappled with 359 cases of COVID-19 and 48 active buds, the city announced it would distribute more than 310,000 N95 masks to house residents, or a 14-day supply, according to a Press release – something the defenders had spent weeks fighting for.
“It’s a huge victory,” said Cathy Crowe, a nurse and activist. “The discrimination was too obvious, they had to do something about it. N95s cannot be given to workers and not to shelter clients.”
Crowe said that every time she and other advocates reached out to the city to ask for N95s to be issued to shelter residents — a call that began with the rise of Omicron and a greater need for better masks — they were denied and not much explanation was offered.
The hope is that this will slow outbreaks amid “signs of collapse and chaos” in the shelter system, Crowe said.
“I am in contact with a man who is staying in a shelter with an outbreak of about 30 cases,” he said. “He has COVID-19 for the second time. In some cases, services that would normally come in, like health care, don’t come in when there’s an outbreak.”
This is concerning as shelter staff generally do not have the training to manage the illness that COVID-19 can bring on its own, although many health care organizations still regularly visit sites despite outbreaks.
“The shelter workers have no training in terms of providing nursing or nursing care support,” he said. “It’s just horrible. Each shelter must have a (registered practical nurse) or health worker. If you had flu-like symptoms and were in a shelter, it would be hell. There is no one to check on you even every three hours. No one.
Toronto shelter resident Jacqueline Hillier told the Star she had to isolate for four days after testing positive for COVID-19, during which time she said she endured long waits to get water and use the bathroom.
“After my boyfriend and I were in isolation, no one came to see us for 18 hours,” she said. “I had to use a plastic bag to urinate. Nobody came. I didn’t have a drink of water until the next day.”
Outbreaks can sometimes lead to shelters not accepting new referrals, Crowe said, further increasing choking ability.
To that end, the city announced Thursday that it would expand shelter capacity by converting two community centers into emergency shelters.
The press release did not say how many beds would open, and a city spokesperson told the Star on Thursday that this information would be announced once the new sites are ready to open.
“That’s concerning,” said AJ Withers, a housing advocate and adjunct professor at York University. “They have opened new sites that were previously only for 12 people. That’s not much.
If a significant number of new spaces open, it would be an important first step in addressing the crisis in the current housing system, Withers said.
Getting people out of the cold so they don’t die or lose their fingers and toes is paramount right now. Ultimately, though, Toronto’s homeless population needs more non-congregate settings — single-room housing where isolation is possible — to prevent outbreaks, Withers said.
But the good that opening new sites could do could be undermined by the shelter system’s understaffing. Withers said people trying to secure a place in shelters have experienced major difficulties recently, as their calls to intake lines increasingly go unanswered.
“Having a site open is kind of irrelevant if you can’t even figure out if you can go there,” Withers said. “Many people have experienced what is called a ‘courtesy hang up’ when they call. And consistently, people spend excessive amounts of time on hold. Between the two, people can’t communicate even to find out if there is room to shelter.
“It’s a somewhat useless first step if it’s completely inaccessible.”
Reference-www.thestar.com