Fourteen Homeless People Quarantined Following COVID-19 Exposure

Fourteen homeless men have had to go into quarantine following the infection of an employee at their hostel, RÚV reported.

The hostel at Grandi is for homeless men with addiction problems. Unfortunately, the shelter was temporarily closed yesterday after one of its employees was diagnosed with COVID-19. Nine of the fourteen guests required to quarantine have arrived at the Rauðarárstígur quarantine building. It is not currently known where the other five are. They will need to be in quarantine until Friday when the second test can take place.

Gylfi Þór Þorsteinsson, the supervisor of the outpatient clinics, believes that special attention will need to be paid to this group. This is both to stop them from breaking quarantine and also because of their addiction problems. Gylfi sounds confident about the situation, however: “We have staff who take care of them and we also have security in the house. Whether this group is with us or not, we just try to work with them and it is our experience that if you show respect to people, you get respect back.”

“We are in collaboration with the addiction psychiatric ward at Landspítali,” he went on, “and they are at our fingertips and are here on duty while these individuals are with us. They receive the treatment that is considered necessary each time.”

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