Personal hygiene is more important than ever, but with businesses closed the homeless are going weeks without proper showers or hand washing

• Individuals experiencing homelessness have previously relied on the bathrooms at local businesses for running water.
• With businesses, gyms and libraries, and other services closed, many on the margins have gone weeks without the ability to shower or use the restrooms.
• Many are now using gallons of water to wash up when they can.
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Shannon Johnson hasn't had a proper shower in three weeks. With public restrooms closed for social distancing measures, relieving himself requires a bucket, paper napkins, and an empty trash bag.

He washes up using gallons of waters he buys at local convenience stores or receives at a food pantry.

"It's very undignified, but it's what you do when you have an emergency," Johnson told Business Insider, shortly after being woken up early Tuesday morning by the intense Las Vegas sun streaming through the windows of the Nissan Altima where he lives.

With the highly contagious coronavirus continuing to spread in the US, personal hygiene is more important now than ever. The Center for Disease Control recommends one of the best ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is by regularly washing your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds.

But people experiencing homelessness around the country, like Johnson, are finding it nearly impossible to stay clean. And that's leaving homeless populations across the country more vulnerable to the virus.

Cities including San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles have all seen upticks in coronavirus cases among their homeless populations.

In Las Vegas, between 5,000 and 6,000 people are living in homelessness and about 60 percent of them are unsheltered, according to Kathi Thomas-Gibson, director of the city's Community Services Department.

Many of these people had previously stayed clean by washing up in the bathrooms of city restaurants, visiting the library, or utilizing other public services.

Johnson has used the showers at his gym, for which he pays a monthly membership of $25.

"A membership at our rec center was like two bucks a month. and those have showers,'' Thomas-Gibson said of the city's public resources. "Well, now those rec centers are closed just like the for-profit gyms. So, yes, people are having challenges."

While those who have been staying in shelters have access to showers there, there are many men and women who sleep in their cars or on the street because there aren't enough beds for everyone.

In Las Vegas, there is a 500-bed shelter and homeless resource center under construction, Thomas-Gibson said. Many of its services are already up and running, but while the structure itself is still being built, guests have relied on a local nonprofit's portable shower truck.

"We had a community partner that had a mobile shower truck that came to the city's homeless resource center," Thomas-Gibson said. "The board of directors decided that the COVID-19 pandemic provided too much of a risk and liability and so they had mothballed that shower truck. We were shocked."

In late March, Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada, a shelter that housed around 500 people, was forced to shut down after a man staying there tested positive for the disease. As an emergency measure, the city converted the parking lot of the Cashman Center into a shelter, doling out marked spaces to each person to encourage social distancing, City spokesman Jace Radke told Time.

The shelter reopened several days later but instituted a social distancing policy that reduced its number of available beds from 500 to 250.

Since then, the city has also opened up an isolation complex, meant to house homeless people with coronavirus diagnoses and symptoms.

No showers, and no help

Outside of relying on public restrooms, many people experiencing homelessness survive by sharing coming together and sharing resources. With social distancing measures and fears of the coronavirus, that has stopped too.

Cheryl Doktorczyk, who is living in her car in Huntington Park, California, told Business Insider that she's been homeless several times though out her life. This most recent bout, after losing her job because of restaurant business shutdowns, has been the most difficult.

In the past, she'd been able to visit the apartments of her friends to use their running water, but now they're fearful of letting her do so. She, like Johnson, has been washing up using gallons of water she buys at local stores.

"This is the catch 22. We say don't congregate in large groups, but what people have historically done is, you come together in groups to help each other," Thomas-Gibson said.

"This is a cliche, but you have to say it: we've never seen anything like this," she added. "Where our natural and human instinct is to come together and make do, now that's dangerous. It's actually dangerous to do that."

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