Toronto’s shelters and food banks are working to contain the spread of COVID-19, while struggling to maintain services to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents who don’t have a place to isolate or the means to stockpile food.

City Coun. Joe Cressy, who chairs the Toronto Board of Health, said increased infection prevention practices, including cleaning and disinfectant measures, have been introduced in all 63 city-run shelters and its eight respite centres, as well as Out of the Cold and other agency programs that Toronto supports.

Toronto’s shelter intake desk is screening clients for their health and travel history and it has secured motel rooms so that homeless residents have a place to isolate in the event they are ill or quarantined. Those individuals will also be provided with food and the city is talking to the province about the provision of substances for people with addictions.

“If you have an addiction and you need to be in self-isolation so you are not transmitting a disease, how do we provide a safe supply in a legal mechanism to you,” he said.

He said that Toronto is also scaling up space to alleviate crowding in respite centres. Refugees and asylum claimants arriving in the city will remain at a centralized location for 14 days’ isolation to ensure they exhibit no COVID-19 symptoms. That facility has the required space. After that period, those people will be allowed to access the shelter system, said Cressy.

The city has also asked hospitals not to release homeless people being investigated for COVID-19 directly into the shelter system or onto the street so those individuals can access isolation facilities, Cressy said. Toronto’s Streets to Homes staff will be monitoring people who don’t use the shelter system, he said.

The homeless population is disproportionately vulnerable to the virus, with a large number of elderly people and many people who have underlying health conditions.

“It’s a vulnerable population to begin with and the absence of housing can make containment harder,” Cressy said.

The Daily Bread Food Bank is radically altering its operations as it tries to balance its mission to feed the hungry with concerns about the health and well-being of its staff and volunteers, CEO Neil Hetherington said.

“If we close down, thousands go hungry,” he said.

Instead of inviting clients inside the food bank to select their groceries, users will receive a box of food outside the facility with the appropriate quantity to feed their families

“That limits the number of clients who are coming in and having that interaction,” he said.

Inside the food bank, volunteers and staff will work in teams of five instead of 15 and Hetherington said he expects it will move to weekend operations so they can have more shifts with 20 people inside the facility at one time rather than the 120 who are typically working there.

It’s too soon to say if the precautions around COVID-19 are affecting donations, but it has impacted volunteers. Two-thirds of the 60 students who had signed up for a March Break “camp” at the food bank have dropped out and Hetherington said he isn’t looking to make up those numbers.

“The average food bank user has $7.83 a day to survive on so it’s not a viable option to go say go buy two weeks worth of food,” he said.

If more people are forced to isolation, the food bank will look at ordering food and having it delivered to clients’ homes but Hetherington said that will be an onerous expense.

Toronto’s Out of the Cold shelter beds will be discontinued this week ahead of the usual April closing, said David Reycraft, director of housing services at Dixon Hall, an agency that supports the program. He said Out of the Cold provides about 90 beds a night through churches, synagogues and agencies around the city.

The St. Luke’s site on Sherbourne St. was expected to have 40 beds on Sunday and 188 Carlton St. is expected to have 45 beds on Wednesday.

“Next week we know a good number of the sites have decided not to open up,” he said, while some sites are providing food only to overnight guests and reducing the number of beds available.

He said Out of the Cold providers are working with the city to ensure that everyone is served.

The Interfaith Coalition to Fight Homelessness has written to Mayor John Tory asking that he authorize the Red Cross to open a replacement shelter for 100 people who won’t be able to access that program any more.

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The letter, signed by nine Out of the Cold providers, says the replacement shelter should be built to “shelter standards” with six feet of space between sleeping mats or cots, sufficient toilets, sinks and showers, as well as hot meals for the duration of the pandemic.

In some of the Out of the Cold facilities, “the mats are inches apart. There are 10 people at a table where there should be six,” said coalition spokesperson Rafi Aaron.

Social distancing to avoid the spread of the virus is difficult in some of the locations, Reycraft added.

“In many ways I think the greatest fear is that the volunteers and community church and synagogues might be transmitting the virus to the guests who often have primary health issues and compromised immune systems,” Reycraft said.

The Stop Community Food Centre is also suspending programming and drop-in meals during the crisis, said executive director Rachel Gray. The Stop operates three community programs for homeless and low-income residents in the city’s west end.

“We are making sure our staff, volunteers and community members are as safe as they can be. We recognize you can’t meaningfully run a drop-in program with hundreds of people sitting together — as we want people to be able to do — and protect them in the face of this kind of contagion and the potential for community contagion.

“We couldn’t see any other way to keep people safe and to continue with business as usual,” she said.

The Stop has also closed the Saturday morning farmers market at the Wychwood Barns.

“We know this is a profound hardship on these farmers who rely on these markets. But we can’t have somewhere between 500 to 1,000 people safely in a confined space and be doing what the government of Canada is asking everyone to do, which is limit public gatherings over 250 people.

“It’s been a very hard decision to make, but between the concerns of community volunteers and staff, it’s one that we just felt we had to make.”

At the organization’s Davenport Avenue food bank, staff are prepackaging food hampers. “This diminishes choice, but we think it’s probably the safest way to do things.”

The Stop’s drop-in food programs at the Davenport and St. Matthew’s United Church sites will have menus converted into takeout meals.

There were about one million food bank visits in the Toronto region last year, according to the Daily Bread Food Bank.