When Ashley Shew turned up for an appointment at a medical centre in spring 2020, a member of staff told her she could remove her mask because only people with pre-existing conditions were vulnerable to COVID-19. Shew was surprised. “A hard-of-hearing amputee battered by chemotherapy and more”, as she describes herself, she is a regular at the centre — the appointment that day concerned her prosthetic leg. Who, she wondered, did the staff member think counted as a person with pre-existing conditions?
The invisibility of disability is not new, says Shew, a 38-year-old philosopher who explores the intersection of technology and disability at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. “But it is particularly deadly that we don’t frame COVID-19 as a disability issue,” she says. “Even linguistically we’re pointed away from it. ‘Pre-existing conditions’ is a way of not saying ‘disability’.”
From the beginning of this pandemic, people with disabilities understood that the disease would target them and would swell their ranks. Disability historians knew that there was a penumbra of ill health to previous mass-death events. Health economists warned that, as with tuberculosis, HIV and other diseases, morbidity would stalk mortality. Too many others have clung stubbornly to a belief that COVID-19 is something from which a minority of people die, and that most bounce back quickly and intact, with only their immune system updated. The longer the pandemic drags on, the harder it is to maintain that fiction.
Read more at Nature.