After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, more than 300 volunteers dispersed across Oahu on Thursday morning to record the number of unsheltered homeless people for the annual Point-in-Time count.

Oahu’s Point-in-Time audit was postponed in January due to the high levels of COVID-19 infections, although it was still conducted on the neighbor islands over four days starting Jan. 23.

At the start of the Oahu count Thursday morning, by 6 a.m. a room at Arts at Marks Garage downtown was buzzing with about 100 volunteers and outreach workers ready to survey the area.

“Thank you for being here today and showing that everybody counts, especially our unsheltered,” said Hawaii Health Harm Reduction Center Executive Director Heather Lusk.

In January 2020 the number of unsheltered homeless people counted on Oahu was 2,346.

Volunteers used an electronic app on their phones or iPads to record general demographic information for the unsheltered they encountered, such as race, gender and age. Individuals were asked whether they were willing to be interviewed, and those who declined were noted as “observational.”

Incentives for participating included hygiene products and a McDonald’s coupon.

Dr. Christina Wang, who runs a weekly clinic in Chinatown for the Hawaii Health Harm Reduction Center, led a team of about four volunteers.

Wang said there were several reasons this year’s survey might result in an undercounting of unsheltered homeless people.

First, she said the survey is based on where the person slept the night before, and if someone homeless were in a hospital or arrested overnight, that person would not be counted. In addition, since the count was happening at the beginning of the month, those receiving supplemental support income likely were not yet short on funds and on the streets. Finally, although the city agreed to not conduct sweeps of homeless encampments the week of the Point-in-Time count, officers in Chinatown were still giving out citations to people lying on the sidewalk, Wang said.

Kynsie Won, who was participating as part of the city’s Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program, which diverts nonemergency homeless-­related 911 calls to a designated ambulance, said she noticed that there were fewer homeless people in Chinatown on Thursday morning.

“I can tell you right now the streets for us are empty,” she said.

Wang said people were less interested in talking to surveyors than in years past, which she partially attributed to the pause in the annual event.

Larry Rivera, a 72-year-old homeless man, who participated, had been homelessness for about five to seven years. Since the last Point-in-Time count, he said, he had seen some new faces on the streets of Chinatown.

“They come and go,” he said. “They go to jail or they go to the hospital, or they die.”

Since COVID-19, Rivera said, he has also seen more young people on the streets doing drugs, getting involved in gang activity and stealing.

“I didn’t know where to come,” he said about remaining in the Chinatown area. “That’s what kept me coming back, because I have nowhere to go.”

The results of the count will not be finalized until late April, but to meet the federal reporting deadline of April 30, Lusk noted some anecdotal trends at the end of the day.

A new question was added to the survey this year asking whether the person’s homelessness was related to COVID-19, and while some may have had the virus, “quite a few people note that they were unsheltered because of the overall shelter capacity being diminished because of COVID,” she said. “Several mentioned that they had been sheltered, but then the shelter went on lockdown or stopped intakes because of COVID.”

Laura Thielen, executive director of Partners in Care, which organized the Point-in-Time Count, expressed a similar interest in how shelter space would affect the count. “Right now the unsheltered (number) looks around the same, which is good in the sense that we haven’t added a huge amount to the unsheltered. But that’s also because we’ve done a lot of housing in the last couple of months,” she said.

“But it will be very interesting to see the sheltered count because some of the shelters depopulated during COVID. And some of them have not ramped all the way back.”

Thielen said she’s also interested in seeing whether efforts from the city to decrease homelessness in Chinatown have actually gotten people off the street or just moved the population to a different part of the island.

A complete report, including the number of sheltered homeless people and other data trends, will likely be available in mid-May.