For the past month, our shelter has been undergoing an epidemic of “shelter cough:” no fever, nausea, or symptoms other than nasal congestion and loud coughing with the expulsion of phlegm. When mentioned to staff and/or medical authorities on-site, the response is, “Oh, yeah, it’s going around.” (No surprise, given such close sleeping quarters.) The complainant is usually given cough syrup and antibiotics and told to report back if symptoms abate or continue. No talk of quarantine. Why? Because there are so many COVID cases, any on/off-site quarantining would be quickly overwhelmed. So, hit whatever it is with pills and syrup. No testing, no lung X-rays, no sputum cultures to find out what bug(s) is/are responsible. But if it were COVID –well, then you’d see some action.

What with the “shelter cough,” plus the viral trifecta of COVID, RSV, and influenza on the rampage, and the lights on 24/7 “for your protection,” it’s not a joy-joy existence for your own correspondent and his fellow shelter denizens. Proving that 24-hour lighting is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment has enough obstacles if you’re dealing with a prison environment; it’s never been case-tested in a voluntary environment like a shelter, probably because the response would be “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” So you’re given Hobson’s Choice between sleeping outdoors in dicey conditions at best or sleeping in an environment where the lights are never off, raising Hell with everyone’s circadian rhythms, and doing God knows what to people’s mental equilibrium. Life as a guinea pig. What prizes do we have for our vectors, Johnny?

In the usual spirit of giving credit where it’s due, this needs to be said. When the COVID epidemic hit, the CA Department of Social Services quickly recognized that homeless shelters were going to become primary transmission sites for the virus unless decisive action was taken immediately. So in March 2020, they began Project Roomkey, described in a press release “as part of the state response to the COVID-19 pandemic…to provide non-congregate shelter options, such as hotels and motels, for people experiencing homelessness, to protect human life, and to minimize strain on health care system capacity.”

Later that year, Project Roomkey was expanded and renamed Project Roomkey and Rehousing Strategy. Again, quoting from the press release: “This new phase of the program built on existing emergency shelter efforts while also supporting permanent transitions to safe and stable housing to ensure homelessness is non-recurring.” It sounds like a prudent and timely response to keeping unhoused persons as safe and healthy as possible during a global pandemic while also transitioning them to more permanent housing.

So why hasn’t your own correspon- dent mentioned this program before? For the simple reason that until he did a Google search on transitional housing in Orange County on January 1, 2024–as part of research for this column–he had no idea the program existed- ed. No housing navigator had mentioned it. No social services worker had vouchsafed its existence.