Are People in Need Taken Care of During This Tough Pandemic?

By Yasmine Toure

I sat in front of my computer and decided to make research about how the homeless are taken care of during this pandemic and how effective the measures taken to help them have been. I was glad to find many articles about how people helped homeless during the pandemic.

The states’ governments do their best to help them with home shelters and transportation cars to make sure that they stay in safe places. I also noticed that communities played a major role in helping homeless. Communities are the major key for help. Indeed, communities operate on a smaller scale, which allows them to locate where the biggest issues are, and which solutions will be more efficient.

Even though homeless people are more exposed to hunger, there are not the only persons involved in it. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, some people have less revenue and have to reduce the budget that they have for food. Large households with low incomes are in difficult situations. Fortunately, communities are here to help them. For example, in my community, a lot of small associations decided to bring food to people in need even though some of them are not homeless. This is one of the best initiatives I have seen because we do not know how difficult it is for people, no matter how affluent they might look.

Still, there are still a lot of homeless who have not been taken care of. Indeed, only 20% of all the homeless have received help since the pandemic started. Also, it might be difficult for homeless to respect the measures against coronavirus, especially if they have to stay in small shelters or small transportations because it exposes them more to coronavirus. However, states are innovative and research to be more efficient during this pandemic never stops. Communities can also help, which means we can also help and find innovative ways to decrease the risks of coronavirus on homeless. I am part of my community, you are part of your community, and we can all in one way or another help homeless and people fighting with hunger.