The Legal Aid Society and other homeless rights organizations are decrying a move by the de Blasio administration to shut down NYC’s subway service nightly in order to sanitize the trains and decamp a desperate homeless population that has used the near-empty subway cars as a refuge from the rampant coronavirus outbreak currently crippling the city, as reported by ABC News.

Advocates fear that the move will put the homeless – many of whom avoid shelters for precisely the reason that they cannot provide adequate “social distancing” – will put them in even greater danger of contracting the deadly virus.

“It’s just an outright disaster,” says Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. Goldfein maintains that the real solution is proper housing – a chronic issue for New York City that the de Blasio administration has failed to adequately address.