MARTHA WALLS_ Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage

11/30/22, 3:12 PM MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage | SaltWire FLASH SALE

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MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage

Ableism in the pandemic’s early days was taken to new levels by the complete removal of safety measures

Contributed | Posted: Aug. 2, 2022, 3:06 p.m. | Updated: Aug. 3, 2022, 7:03 a.m. | 7 Min Read 5

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11/30/22, 3:12 PM MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage | SaltWire

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston and Dr. Robert Strang, chief medical officer of health, appear in a video released April 6, 2022, promoting individual responsibility in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.- Screenshot

Martha Walls is a historian, disability rights advocate and member of the COVID action group PoPNS (Protect our Province N.S). Twitter: @PoP_NovaScotia

MARTHA WALLS • Guest Opinion

One in three Nova Scotians has a visible or invisible disability — the highest provincial rate of disability in Canada, according to a 2017 survey shared by the government of Nova Scotia.

Like all Nova Scotians, people with disabilities desperately want to be done with COVID-19. But many Nova Scotians with physical, mental and age-related disabilities cannot simply throw away their masks and “get back out there.” It’s not just a virus that is preventing them from moving on: the actions of

politicians and public health leaders are also to blame.

SHIRA LURIE: Nova Scotia's 'living with COVID' strategy

backfires

Nova Scotia’s July 28 COVID-19 update shows five

deaths, 60 new hospital admissions

Nova Scotians learned quickly to link COVID vulnerability and disability. The very first reported death of a person due to COVID in Nova Scotia on April 7, 2020, emphasized the “underlying medical condition” of the deceased. Public Health has repeated this message many times since, not as evidence of a need to offer special protections to people with disabilities, but rather to downplay the risk of COVID to “normal” (able) people. This message has persisted despite protests by disability rights advocates who argue that it fuels the ablest belief that the lives of people with disabilities are less valuable, their deaths less tragic.

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11/30/22, 3:12 PM MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage | SaltWire

Exacerbating the risk posed by the virus to people with disabilities is Nova Scotia’s pandemic policy that has blatantly ignored the important concept of health equity. Equitable, or fair, health care rests on the premise that each person deserves health care that allows them to be optimally healthy. Equitable health care is not “one size fits all” and must take into account people’s differing needs. Simply, some people require — and deserve — different and/or more care than others.

Left unchecked by Public Health policy, COVID is itself creating “underlying conditions” and disability in Nova Scotia.

A stark example of Public Health’s rejection of the concept of equity in health care and its negative impact on the health and quality of life of Nova Scotians with disabilities involved the initial rollout of COVID vaccines. As the work of the disability rights group Ready for My Shot reported, Nova Scotia was the only province in Canada that did not have a policy of expediting vaccines for people with certain conditions and disabilities, such as Down syndrome, that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and death.

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11/30/22, 3:12 PM MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage | SaltWire

Martha Walls: “Nova Scotia was the only province in Canada that did not have a policy of expediting vaccines for people with certain conditions and disabilities, such as Down syndrome, that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and death.- Contributed photo

Divisive language

In response to the lobby of rights advocates who lamented the lack of equity in this plan, chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang argued that expediting vaccines for “special interest groups” would slow the vaccine rollout and put at risk all Nova Scotians. For people with disabilities, this perspective was damaging on two fronts: not only did it fail to address their heightened clinical risk to COVID, but it unethically reduced this equity-deserving population to a “special interest group” and positioned attendance to their particular and legitimate health needs not as the right it is, but as a threat to majority well-being.

In the end, Nova Scotia’s vaccination program did not meaningfully outpace any of the nine provinces that did choose to prioritize vaccines for people with disabilities. Refusing to respect the health needs of people with disabilities for the sake of a faster rollout was a miscalculation as much as it was an ethical misstep. We may never know the health toll of this policy, but the hypervigilance

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11/30/22, 3:12 PM MARTHA WALLS: Nova Scotians with disabilities treated as COVID collateral damage | SaltWire

that citizens with disabilities had to exercise to avoid exposure led to the isolation of an already-marginalized group from society. It also reinforced a sinister ableism that continues, 2.5 years into the pandemic, to unfairly place Nova Scotians with disabilities at special risk of COVID.

Ableism that reared its head in the pandemic’s early days was taken to new levels by the complete removal of COVID safety measures under the leadership of Premier Tim Houston. The end of social distancing, mask mandates and isolation orders — poorly timed, just as highly transmissible variants arrived in the province — has again forced people with disabilities to withdraw from society to protect their health. Adults and children with disabilities, particularly those whose conditions prohibit mask-wearing, can no longer safely venture into public, not even to grocery stores, pharmacies or schools.

People with disabilities continue to constitute a disproportionate number of COVID hospitalizations and deaths. As Public Health continues to emphasize that it is “underlying conditions” that kill, it is little wonder that Nova Scotians have en masse refused to voluntarily wear masks in public to protect the vulnerable. We have been conditioned to accept that people with disabilities are the unfortunate, but unavoidable, collateral damage of living with COVID.

Devaluing people

The devaluation of people with disabilities is being amplified as an overwhelmed health-care system struggles to cope with the virus that is spreading so rapidly because of relaxed COVID safety protocols. Early in the pandemic, as health jurisdictions across North America grappled with inadequate numbers of ventilators, triage instructions placed people with disabilities at the bottom of the list. This trend continues. A recent U.K. study appearing in the Journal of Medical Ethics shows that as pressures to health-care systems build, doctors are becoming less likely to take steps to save the lives of the elderly and medically frail. The removal of public health measures has created an unprecedented burden on our health-care system, and chilling evidence suggests that people with disabilities are bearing the brunt.

The issue of disability and (in)equitable access to health care is not going anywhere. One of the cruellest of ironies of the Houston government’s decision to remove all pandemic safety protocols — measures that would protect children and adults with disabilities and allow them to participate in their communities — is that that it will certainly increase already-high rates of disability in Nova Scotia. It is estimated that at least 20 per cent of people, young and old, who contract the virus will suffer from long COVID, a suite of conditions that can

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create long-term illness — including heart disease and neurological decline — and for some, result in disability.

Nova Scotians are already suffering from long COVID. Nova Scotia Health reports that half of Nova Scotians who have had COVID still have at least one symptom 12 weeks following their first positive COVID test, while another 10 per cent have

a symptom and a “functional impairment.” Left unchecked by Public Health policy, COVID is itself creating “underlying conditions” and disability in Nova Scotia.

Throughout the pandemic, Nova Scotia has devalued the rights of people with disabilities. One cannot help but worry that the ableism reinforced so far by the pandemic will not just continue to undermine the well-being of people whose disabilities predate the virus but will result in the province refusing to address the needs of the many Nova Scotians newly disabled by COVID.

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