Covid-19’s Impact on the Homeless Populations

Nursing students Michelle Drown ’21, Bruce Raymond ’21 and Emily Smith ’21, members of a Maine Medical Center BSN cohort, senior project involved working with Maine Public Health/Portland Public Heath on a 40 hour project working directly with public health, spoke about their project:

“Our project for Community Health Class investigated how COVID-19 affects underserved populations in Maine, specifically the homeless. Our project highlights the fact that as a society we need better funding, more housing opportunities, programs which enable people to work toward self-sufficiency, and now, better contact tracing to effectively treat this population. We need to work to prevent homelessness by providing rental assistance and a continued moratorium on eviction during the pandemic. And, of course, we need better ways to educate the homeless about COVID-19. All this requires more federal, state, and local resources.”