It’s all in your head.
The number of homeless people seeking refuge in the subway system amid the coronavirus pandemic isn’t as high as it seems, MTA Chairman Pat Foye claimed Monday — it just looks bad because there are fewer other straphangers.
“There are fewer people overall on the subways, which makes, frankly, the homeless situation appear bigger,” Foye said on WNYC radio in response to a listener question about trains “completely taken over by the homeless.”
“A normal ridership on the subways has a social check in terms of the homeless,” Foye said, adding that NYPD and MTA cops have been tasked to “arrange for housing or support services” for vagrants residing in the subway.
“We’re doing everything we can to make sure the homeless get treated with respect and fairly, but also that they don’t interfere with this critical essential service that the MTA is running right now,” he said.
A veteran train conductor told The Post last week that they’d seen cars with “six or seven” homeless people “lying back to back.”
“People are there going to work worried about this virus,” the conductor said. “I got compassion too, but those people are going to work, paying $125 per month.”
Catherine Trapani of Homeless Services United said homelessness “may be more visible in the subway now that crowds have thinned out,” but the city needs to move people to hotel rooms, per federal guidelines, rather than into shelters or the situation won’t change.
“Using police to move people out of trains will only serve to disperse homeless people through the shelter and transit systems making it harder to mitigate risk with social distancing,” she said. “It is not only wrong, but contrary to federal guidance and it is dangerous.”
More than 100 homeless New Yorkers have tested positive for the coronavirus, the city revealed Monday.
Foye told host Brian Lehrer that the agency has too many workers out due to coronavirus to run more trains and alleviate crowding of both commuters and down-and-outs.
“We do not have the ability to add additional service given the number of confirmed cases that we have at the MTA,” he said. “That’s just not an option right now.”
Nearly 600 agency employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and over 3,000 are in quarantine — including Foye, who announced Saturday he also has the virus.
Eight workers have died from the virus — including a cleaner whose family said she was unable to get through to the the agency’s overloaded employee coronavirus hotline.
On Friday, the MTA announced it had acquired 75,000 masks to distribute to its frontline workforce — a reversal of course from the agency’s previous insistence on following CDC and World Health Organization recommendations against them.
“We have decided not to take that advice going for as far back as last week, and indeed the World Health Organization yesterday affirmed the same advice. That doesn’t make sense to us,” Foye said in an interview with MSNBC Tuesday.