‘This is a life or death thing:’ Disabled people facing discrimination in critical COVID-19 situations

People with disabilities are concerned that they may face discrimination when accessing life-saving medical care because of the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

That’s why on the International Day of Disabled Persons, 64 organizations and groups from across the province have sent Premier Doug Ford an open letter urging him to ensure that doesn’t happen.

David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Alliance, says they want a triage protocol to protect disabled patients from discrimination if a COVID surge requires critical care rationing.

Lepofsky says there’s a real possibility that the hospital will get overwhelmed if the projections are correct — which he and the alliance hopes doesn’t happen.

“But if there are more patients needing critical care than there are doctors and critical care beds to deliver it, there’s the real possibility that the government foresaw last February, and rightly so, that they are going to have to ration that care [do triage] that means some people who need it — and that’s life saving care — will be told they can’t get it,” Lepofsky says. “We want to know what the rules are going to be, over how they’re going to decide and who is going to decide. Who gets told, 'Yes', and who gets told, 'You need life-saving care but you don’t get it.'”

Lepofsky says, last spring, without telling the public, the government circulated a protocol on this, and the disability community found out that it involved discrimination against some patients with disabilities.

The protocol included doctors using a criterion called a Clinical Trail T Scale, which would ask a patient if they could do 11 activities of daily living without assistance, like shopping, cooking meals, getting out of bed on their own, etc. If these patients could do those activities without assistance, Lepofsky explains that they would get “down-rated” and possible triaged out.

Once the alliance found out, Lepofsky says the government rescinded the protocol about a month ago.

The government has a recommendation from their own bioethics advisors, but the Ford government isn’t allowing the alliance, nor the public, to see it — to know what they’re considering.

Their reason? Lepofsky says they were told they would see it if “things get significantly worse.”

“The rates [that have been reported] and modelling is showing that it’s going to get worse. This is a life or death thing,” he said. “We’re just saying to the government, tell us what your advisors recommended. The Human Rights Commission said they should tell us — their own bioethics table says they should tell us.”

No one wants there to be triage, but if there is going to be triage Lepofsky says the government needs to show them the rules and consult the alliance so as to make sure human rights violations don’t happen because of the new rules.