Disability Ghosting in the Double Lockdown Institution of COVID-19

Abstract

This paper surveys some of the voluminous journalistic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public health responses that ensued. While investigative reporting in newspapers and news programming played an important function, we expose the terms of the underreporting about the lockdowns in institutions for the disabled and elderly that ultimately changed little about public knowledge of the lives of disabled people who were always or already confined. Second, we detail the rapid unfolding of a critical journalism that revealed the mortality-dealing conditions of institutionalization beyond the acceleration of pandemic risk levels. Such governmental and for-profit run practices of letting individuals who were disabled or elderly die while in their care were enacted, of which residents could do nothing to protect themselves (in fact, risky exposure was a conscious practice of state governments during the unfolding viral epidemic). This essay argues, however, that a critical branch of COVID-19 journalism (largely based in the US) used investigative reporting to expose governmental miscounting, undercounting, and neglecting-to-count of disability deaths due to COVID-19 and/or to collect them under “other categories,” such as the overall death rate of a population. Our key findings point out that despite the importance of this coverage, no one used this opportunity to talk with institutionalized disabled and/or elderly people—who were gravely at risk. Thus, we learned little about disabled peoples’ lives as they were shipped back to congregate care settings and institutions from hospitals without treatment. An opportunity to explain disability institutionalization and its inherent dangers were lost despite the media saturation of coverage that rose in the wake of COVID-19 public health policies and practices.