“[We’re told], you know, ‘If you’re not an essential worker, stay home,’” says Marcus Moore, a man experiencing unsheltered homelessness in New York City, in a recent interview with the independent news channel Now This (2020). “Well, suppose you don’t got a home.”

Marcus Moore’s comment points to the complex public health challenges associated with homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first half of 2020, 85% of US states and territories – along with at least 40 countries globally – issued mandatory stay-at-home orders to facilitate social distancing and slow the spread of COVID-19 (Chaudhry et al., 2020; Moreland et al., 2020). But a ‘home’ – or, more generally, adequate accommodation – is more than just a place to socially distance. It provides people with access to basic hygiene facilities (Tsai & Wilson, 2020), and hygiene is the second key tenet of COVID-19 prevention. It removes people from the congregate, often outdoor conditions which are conducive to the spread of disease (Tsai & Wilson, 2020). It minimizes the movement of highly-transient homeless populations (Tobolowsky et al., 2020), and so may facilitate their access to and engagement with health and other services. Most fundamentally, a home may also provide some degree of certainty in what an increasingly uncertain world.