To help protect some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, San Jose is setting up 109 state-owned trailers to house homeless people diagnosed with or exposed to coronavirus, city officials announced Tuesday.

The trailers, which are located in the east parking lot at Happy Hollow Park and Zoo in south San Jose, will be used to isolate homeless people with confirmed or presumed coronavirus cases but do not need to be hospitalized, according to the city.

They were delivered late last week but are not expected to be used until the end of March, because city staff members are currently inspecting and refurbishing them and connecting them with utilities.

The city is still developing a plan for how it will be managed and which nonprofit organizations will provide services to the housed patients, according to the city’s communications director, Rosario Neaves.

As of Tuesday, San Jose had identified 800 temporary shelter beds, including the 109 trailers, to house the city’s homeless population during the pandemic, according to Lee Wilcox, chief of staff for the city manager.

In addition to the trailers, the city is moving at-risk individuals into more than two dozen vacant units in the city’s first tiny home community for formerly homeless individuals, which was completed earlier this year.

The city has also prepared two large facilities on the city’s convention center campus in downtown San Jose — South Hall and Parkside Hall — as temporary shelter locations. It has expanded hours at its overnight warming locations at the city’s Bascom and Roosevelt Community Centers so they are operating all hours of the day, every day of the week now. And, city officials are looking into leasing out motel rooms for additional beds.

But with more than 6,000 homeless people living in the city, officials recognize that they have a long way to go to protect residents living on the city’s street and shelters who are particularly vulnerable to high morbidity rates of the new coronavirus.

“Our goal is to stand up thousands of temporary shelter beds as quickly as possible because that is the number that public health experts in the county believe may be needed to contain the spread of COVID among our unsheltered community,” Lee Wilcox, chief of staff for the San Jose city manager, said during a council meeting on Tuesday.

Still, one homeless individual who showed up to the city council meeting on Tuesday scolded the city for the state of its warming facilities and the lacking amount of shelter beds for those currently on the street.

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NIH official to ‘retire’ after being ID’d as anti-Fauci author “That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen right now. They’re not socially distancing people,” he said about the Roosevelt Community Center warming location.

The San Jose City Council on Tuesday also unanimously approved allocating $2 million to a fund aimed at providing financial assistance to tenants at risk of eviction because of income loss due to coronavirus.

San Jose is not the only Bay Area city looking at innovative options to isolate homeless residents who are ill or have been exposed to the virus. San Francisco has also leased RVs that will be set up in the Presidio and then deployed around the city as needed to isolate its homeless residents.