NY Times Op-ed by Dr. Li: When a Pandemic Strikes Americans Who are Already Suffering

BERKELEY, Calif. — Kamran Abri makes “tent calls” here in Berkeley, where the homeless live in doorways, on streets, under bushes, in parks, and in ramshackle villages under freeway offramps. An energetic young medical student with dark, penetrating eyes, Mr. Abri and a small team visited one such village at dusk last week. There were 20 or so tents sheltering 50 people, with cooking stoves, backpacks, plastic folding chairs and butane canisters strewn about.

“If someone comes down with respiratory symptoms,” Mr. Abri asked us, “how can they quarantine themselves?”

Many homeless people don’t go to doctors — they have no insurance or transportation — and doctors virtually never go to them. While medical authorities have urged people to keep a distance from one another to limit the spread of Covid-19, Mr. Abri said that can be hard for him on his visits to encampments for the homeless.

“It feels strange, almost wrong, not to look them in the eye and touch them,” he said. “Are we supposed to bump elbows with the very people our public systems have abandoned? My first job is to regain their trust, to treat them with dignity.”

So he shakes hands and uses alcohol sanitizer between each handshake, he said, “to protect them from me, in case I’m a carrier, not so much to protect me from them — they’re the ones at greatest risk.”

Survival for a huge swath of Americans is already day to day. Covid-19 makes their lives even more precarious.

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