Lucie Richard

Ark Aid scores $3.7M in city funding — more than expected — following heated debate | CBC News London City Council agreed to continue funding Ark Aid's emergency shelter and daytime drop-in spaces for another year, to the tune of nearly $3.7 million.

Thank goodness, common sense prevails.

Incidence and factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and re-infection among people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, Canada: A prospective cohort study People experiencing homelessness are at elevated risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, yet estimates generally exclude re-infections and rely on data sources affected by testing policies or study timing. In t...

📖 You can read the full study here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

🙏 Thank you to the research team & especially the participants of the Ku-gaa-gii pimitizi-win study, who made this and many other studies possible! 🙏

#Homelessness #COVID19 #HealthEquity #Toronto

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀

☑️ COVID-19 burden has been severely underreported among people experiencing homelessness in Canada

☑️ Existing studies on post-infection outcomes—eg. deaths, Long COVID—may also be inaccurate because of this.

We'll address this 2nd point soon in upcoming reports —stay tuned.

Even more concerning: this was measured while Toronto invested big $ in distancing hotels (which actually did decrease risk, vs masking which had no effect). Those protections are being dropped now, so infections are likely even higher today.

The main highlight of the paper?

We identified 🚨𝟵𝟳 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀/𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀🚨 post-Omicron, which is at least 𝟰𝘅 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿 than previous PCR-based estimates for our region. Reinfections were a big part of this, with some folks getting COVID two or even three times.

📢 New study on #COVID19 burden among #homeless in Toronto is now in PLOS One.

Researchers scrambled in the early days to publish ASAP to respond to the pandemic. But 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 can be 𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲, & mess with our understanding of virulence, fatality & Long COVID.

A short thread 🧵

I was just thinking this today. Headed breakneck speed toward Gilead, Maddaddam, or (more likely) some horrible hybrid of the two.

I wonder sometimes if @margaretatwood.bsky.social is actually a time traveler prevented by time paradox from just telling us what's coming.

‘State of Emergency’: Eight frontline agencies call on Council for overnight warming centres for homeless Londoners An open letter to City Council from eight frontline agencies implores City Council to open a warming centre for the over 320 Londoners currently living outdoors as temperatures have plummeted.

It's bonkers that #ldnont doesn't have 24hr warming centers in the dead of Canadian winter.

For sure, let's do the longterm solutions eg affordable/supportive housing. But don't forget to do what's needed to make sure homeless folks survive til then...

www.ctvnews.ca/london/artic...

Great summary. COHB to house every single person, as crazy $$ as that'd be, would still be better than continuing to warehouse people semi-permanently as is clearly happening now, both from a human & cost perspective. Sadly, prevailing political winds mean we'll keep doing the cruel/expensive thing?

You didn't miss it. A lot is implied, methods-wise. The way I interpret the results is including anyone with at least one day of homelessness. Otherwise you get into wondering what the minimum should be.

But the more I think about It the more I want to just ask them about all these things.

Not sure. TSSS documented over 22K unique clients in '23 for Toronto. I'm sitting on some health based numbers suggesting the true number could be as high as 27K tho, so 80k being the bottom for ON sounds about right.

Still, maybe we should petition helpseeker to release their full methodology

I'd wager if there were confidence intervals applied to the estimates that they'd be fairly wide.

100%, the "technical appendix" sucked. It's too bad, after the 240k fiasco I'm more hesitant to accept stuff at face value. The number is vraisemblable at least?

It'll depend on whether data pts could be linked across regions. Otherwise they'd have to assume no mid-year migrations for a start.

Finally, a half decent estimate for how many folks are homeless in Ontario.

You can't fix what you can't even measure.

AMO shouldn't have to do this. The data sources are all administrative, so Ontario (or the feds) could have produced something like this all along.

Yeah there's no way this doesn't get contested as unconstitutional. Wtf

"We don't want to punish people" --> proceeds to outline life changing punishments & little else.

Are we honestly still doing "war on drugs" style approaches to homelessness in the year of our Lord 2025?? Jesus.

Eee, hopefully you're ok!

I mean I get it but compared to momentum from what felt like not so long ago... 😭

I cannot believe in end of 2024 we are here. Still.

One year in, signs of promise and progress at London's 'House of Hope' "What we've seen is people, within three to six months, gain so much stability."

Lovely to see tidbits of London Cares' House of Hope evaluation. Looking forward to the report.

⬇️ overdoses, ⬆️ quality of life & stabilization metrics. Shocking % of deaths though (a tableau of the long term effects of homelessness - treat, yes, but also: prevent!)

lfpress.com/news/local-n...

Sometimes "cut cheque" solutions work, like CERB (for a literal public health emergency) or CCB (to literally raise kids out of poverty).

But here, this does stink of desperation. The focus doesn't seem to be on providing a better social safety net at all.

I'm all for using whatever's needed to support evidence based policy, but I get uneasy at times with these "but it affects you too" arguments (though I've used them too). It should be enough that people will die, and that these services are essential to recovery (survive until ready for treatment)

So many lazy stereotypes about homelessness that don't represent the realities of the majority living it.

And they drive policy - even with tons of evidence to the contrary!

"Evidence-based policy" is so 1990s. What the social media era needs is skilled storytelling to challenge those narratives