I want to highlight a point I made earlier in a thread about all the Seattle libraries closing for at least a month. People without homes are people without many options for staying warm and dry during the day. Public libraries are a haven.
But they aren't just a place to sit and wait out the hours; they're a place to charge phones, get online, get information, use the restroom, and—as someone pointed out earlier—wash hands. With this resource gone, homeless folks are even more isolated and marginalized.
The lack of restrooms will be exacerbated by the fact that the city is also closing all community centers, pools, and other recreational facilities, which are where most of the city's relative handful of public restrooms are located.
The city has done essentially nothing since homelessness was declared an emergency in 2015 to provide more restrooms for unsheltered people and shelter stayers forced to wander outside all day. If you complain about people using alleys as bathrooms, well, this is why.
More than a year ago, the Seattle auditor slammed the city's Human Services Department for failing to provide adequate restrooms for people experiencing homelessness. Little has changed since then. thecisforcrank.com/2019/02/08/aud…
Seattle maintains an interactive map of public restrooms. Here is what it looks like with all restrooms in parks, community centers, and libraries are selected along with official hygiene facilities such as Urban Rest Stops. 
And here is what it looks like with all of those facilities closed. The blue dots are hygiene centers operated by groups like the Chief Seattle Club, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and YouthCare. Most are open very limited weekday hours, often for specific populations.
As for places for people to simply GO during the day, my expectation is that privately run drop-in centers will be closing too. The head of Recovery Cafe, for example, told me today that they will be assessing their options over the next few days.
A lot of attention has been paid to shelter, but homeless people also exist during the day, and this health crisis only exacerbates their isolation, marginalization, and lack of access to basic needs. COVID wasn't predictable, but this outcome during a large-scale crisis was.
I'm certainly not suggesting these facilities should have stayed open during a health crisis.
What I'm saying is that if we'd done more a long time ago to meet people's immediate needs—like opening more public restrooms instead of spending resources creating defensive interactive maps that suggest no problem exists—this aspect of the crisis might have been averted.
Some of those dots are parks where restrooms will stay open for the time being; the map only allows a few binary choices. But the point is, an incredibly sparse map will become sparser because the city has never done a good job of providing places for people to poop and pee.
