The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with disabilities: Perspectives from people with disabilities

Abstract

In this paper, we relied on co-researching with persons with disabilities in Ukraine not as a means of understanding the epidemiology of this disease, or of its impact on human health. We approached COVID-19 and the Ukrainian authorities’ response to the pandemic as proxy, or a magnifying glass, to better understand the everyday life of persons with disabilities in Ukraine, and to explore how things could and should be done differently in the context of public health or other emergencies. The pandemic unsettled and disrupted the meanings of personal space and time for virtually everyone across the world; it unmasked, reinforced and reconfigured existing inequalities, cascading them into further injustices of (im)mobility and access. This is especially true for persons with disabilities. Kennedy-Macfoy uses an analogy in relation to COVID-19. She describes COVID-19 as a ‘looking glass’. Our ‘COVID-19 as a looking glass’ findings presented in both parts of the project report paint a picture of entrenched economic and social deprivations experienced by people with disabilities in Ukraine, patterned by the intersecting and reinforcing inequalities of gender, age, locality, displacement, and socio-economic status, and exacerbated rather than created by the pandemic. This article is devoted to the second part of the extensive study ‘The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on People with Disabilities in Ukraine’. In this article, the authors elaborate on the methodology of the second phase of the study and the views of people with disabilities on the issues of communication about the COVID pandemic and access to medical care during a pandemic for people with disabilities.