Advocate says Saskatoon’s homeless need more help to fight COVID-19

Those advocating for the homeless in Saskatoon say not enough is being done to protect the most vulnerable and prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the homeless population.

The homeless in Saskatoon who are awaiting COVID-19 test results are self-isolating in hotels. If their test results come back negative, they are sent back out to the streets.

Julia Holliday-Scott, the sheltering group lead for the Saskatoon inter-agency response team to COVID-19, says the provincial government has given the team 10 housing units for the homeless to transition into — but that’s nowhere close to the 350 suites they were promised.

“I do feel like it’s not an end solution to this problem,” she said. “They’re going to keep going to the shelter and keep coming back to the hotel and it’s a vicious cycle. What we really need to kind of break that is access to these housing units that are sitting empty in the city and in the province.”

The team was finally able to start transitioning people into the 10 open units this week.

“There have been nearly 30 (homeless) people come through hotels, and we had the applications open up earlier this week for these 10 units and we’ve already filled eight of them,” Holliday-Scott said. “So we definitely don’t have enough units for the numbers we’re seeing.”

She fears Saskatoon’s most vulnerable will be in a situation from which they can’t come back.

“They have some of the most complex health needs in the city, so we know that if and when COVID does hit this homeless population, it’s going to spread like wildfire and that they will be the people that have to take up the most ICU beds in the city,” Holliday-Scott said.

She says it’s heartbreaking to bring the homeless to an area where they have access to medical care, food and shelter and then, once they are medically cleared from COVID, ask them to go back onto the street.

“The inter-agency response is comprised of over 50 organizations and all of them are advocating to try and get these supports in place as quick as possible but, really what we need is just the government to give us what they said they would, which is the 350 suites,” she said.