Mecklenburg pays more than $600,000 to quarantine homeless COVID-19 patients

Mecklenburg County has spent $630,000 since mid-March to house coronavirus patients who are homeless or otherwise have no place to isolate, according to public records.

Those costs, which the county did not confirm, are based on the terms of Mecklenburg’s contract to lease rooms at an unidentified hotel. Documents the county provided to the Observer show the lease expired Wednesday.

The county expects its expenses to be reimbursed by state and federal agencies, a spokeswoman said.

The county did not respond to questions about the location of the hotel, how many coronavirus patients have been isolated in it or what their average length of stay has been.

County Manager Dena Diorio said in March that the county had leased a 123-room hotel for homeless people with COVID-19 symptoms.

“We were concerned that our homeless residents, if they do get sick or they get exposed, they don’t have anywhere else to go,” Diorio said at the time. If sick people remain in homeless shelters, she said, the disease could easily spread to others.

Homeless people are particularly vulnerable during the pandemic because it’s harder for them to practice social distancing and good hygiene, government and shelter officials say. Many also have underlying health conditions, which can exacerbate COVID-19 illness.

On April 2, public health Director Gibbie Harris reported that 58 people, all but one of them homeless, were staying in the county-leased hotel. Among them were people who had tested positive for the virus, displayed symptoms or had been exposed to an infected person. All had no other place to safely self-isolate.

A March 17 contract between the county and a hotel owner whose name is redacted under federal privacy law called for the county to lease 120 rooms for 60 days, according to documents released to the Observer. On May 1 the term was extended through June 30.

The county agreed to pay $50 a day for each room or $42,000 a week.

Asked to confirm the $630,000 total lease cost over the 15-week term, county spokeswoman Tanisha Anderson called the hotel lease “an on-going activity” in direct response to the pandemic.

“The county is working closely with the state on the reporting of these costs, and while we expect full reimbursement between the state and (Federal Emergency Management Agency) support, we cannot say what the reimbursement will be until the activity is completed, and the state and FEMA respond,” Anderson said.

The county also agreed in the lease agreement to replace the rooms’ bedding, towels and mattress encasements at the end of the lease agreement, and to pay for housekeeping, security, front desk staff and disinfection of the rooms. The contract doesn’t cite the costs of those expenses.

Mecklenburg has reported more than 10,000 confirmed cases of the virus among county residents, and as of Wednesday a total of 150 people locally have died.