Fight Coronavirus. Find Homes for the Homeless.

As coronavirus spreads across the U.S., epidemiologists and public health experts keep hitting one message: Stay home. Without social distancing, Covid-19 could kill nearly 2 million Americans — perhaps 17 times as many as there would be if everyone hunkers down. This is why, as of early April, the vast majority of Americans are living under shelter-at-home orders. But what about those who have no homes? On any given day, more than 550,000 people live in the country’s shelters and on its streets. It’s a human tragedy — and a huge hole in the country’s public-health fabric.

Sickness is both a cause and effect of homelessness: It’s hard to stay healthy without reliable access to showers, laundry and toilets, for example, or to manage diabetes if you don’t have a fridge to store insulin. So while people without homes often go to great lengths to stay clean — long before there were bidding wars over hand sanitizer, researchers found its use was nearly universal among the homeless — they nevertheless remain at elevated risk of Covid-19, as well as almost all other health problems. This is true even of those with health insurance.