Nearly 28 million people in the US may be forced to leave their homes as a number of states were ending bans on evictions enacted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns over public health during the crisis, experts have said. A number of US state governments introduced eviction bans in March as COVID-19 ravaged the country's economy and forced millions of Americans into unemployment.

According to data by Princeton University's Eviction Lab, eviction bans have been lifted in cities, including Houston, Cincinnati, Cleveland and St Louis. In Milwaukee, the largest city in the state of Wisconsin, eviction filings dropped to nearly zero after the state introduced an emergency ban in March. But after the order was lifted in May, evictions surged past the pre-pandemic levels, the Princeton lab's data showed. Earlier this month, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that in 44 cities and counties, eviction filings by landlords have almost returned to the levels where bans were never enacted.