Surveying Tenants of Permanent Supportive Housing in Skid Row about COVID-19

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Abstract

Permanent supportive housing (PSH) enrolls highly vulnerable homeless adults who experience early onset of geriatric conditions and require in-home support. Thus, there is potentially a high risk for COVID-19 within PSH, which may necessitate tenants to take protective measures. This study reports on survey results collected from 532 PSH tenants in Los Angeles, California during the 4 th week of March in 2020. Results show that nearly all tenants were aware of COVID-19, and 65% considered it to be a very serious health threat. The latter characteristic was a strong predictor of taking protective measures (i.e., handwashing and social distancing). Tenants in units with shared bathroom facilities had lower odds of social distancing than those in studio apartments. Tenants with mental health diagnoses had lower odds of consistent handwashing. Lack of access to food, hygiene items, and medication delivery were commonly reported barriers to sheltering in place.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.17.20070052: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The study was approved as exempt by the first author’s University Institutional Review Board.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableCovariates included age in years and bivariate indicators of increased risk due to a pre-existing condition, male gender, Black or African American race, Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, presence of a mental health condition, and living in an SRO (as opposed to a studio).

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    ” All analyses were conducted using Stata/SE for Mac, version 16.1 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).
    StataCorp
    suggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    In addition to possible reporting bias referenced above, limitations of this study include lack of information about how tenants first learned of COVID-19, whether they had accurate information about pre-existing conditions that puts them at risk or flu-like symptoms (as well as lack of specific mental health diagnoses), or whether they are exposed to updated information as knowledge of the pandemic increases. It is also unclear the extent to which the sample is representative of most tenants in supportive housing. While the average age and gender of our sample is similar to national estimates of the target population, the majority of our sample identified as Black or African American, which is higher than national and local estimates.1 Still, the fact that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by homelessness and COVID-1918 underlines the importance of research that can inform policies and interventions to be implemented by service providers in order to protect this vulnerable population.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.