04:05
Advocates for WA’s homeless have again raised alarm this week about the comparatively low vaccination rates for rough sleepers with the state’s hard border now down and vaccination rates lagging for that particularly vulnerable community.
Guardian Australia first reported exclusively in January data from Homeless Healthcare that showed a third of the homeless community living on the streets in WA were completely unvaccinated.
Updated vaccination data was released this week by Prof Lisa Wood from the University of Notre Dame in conjunction with Homeless Healthcare, showing the rates of vaccination among WA’s rough sleepers – about 41% of whom are Aboriginal people – are still well behind the state average:
Wood said WA was also lagging in its Covid outbreak response:
Other states with earlier peaks of Covid were much stronger on preventively getting people rough sleeping off the street to reduce risk of Covid exposure and transmission among this high-risk population.
The data comes after representatives of the homeless community and their advocates this week wrote an open letter to the premier, Mark McGowan, urging the government to open hotels and provide accommodation to people sleeping on the streets amid ongoing concerns about WA’s homelessness crisis.
There were 1,001 people known to be living homeless in Perth and Fremantle at the end of last year, according to the Zero Project – the same as a year prior – while the public housing waitlist has risen by more than 3,000 households to 18,388 in 12 months.
The WA government indicated last month in parliament that hotel rooms had been purchased by the Department of Communities for people to isolate or recover from Covid if they had nowhere else to go.
Updated