This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

So I'm talking with Katie Mingle, our senior producer,

and you've been reporting for about a year and a half

on homelessness here in the Bay Area

for a series that we're putting together right now. It's not ready.

It's scheduled to come out at the end of the year, but since the coronavirus crisis has a huge

impact on the unhoused population population we wanted to check in.

Yeah, so basically just as I was starting to wrap up the reporting process,

the coronavirus came and it upended everything for everyone.

And I've been struggling, you know, with how or whether to follow any of what's been happening in terms of COVID and

homelessness.

So not really knowing what I would do with any of it. I just started kind of checking in with people just over, you know, the phone and Zoom and whatnot,

trying to at least kind of keep up with it all.

And I was recording those conversations and I decided that some of them felt worth sharing.

And it seems that homeless people are one of the populations that people are talking about as being particularly

vulnerable to this disease.

Yeah, so based on data that researchers already have about age and underlying health conditions in homeless people.

A study from a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA

found that homeless people would be twice as likely to be

hospitalized as the general population, two to four times as likely to require

critical care, and two to three times as likely to die if

they contracted COVID-19. And it seems like some of the places where homeless people

...