“Mild COVID-19 is not the same as mild taco sauce,” says Hannah Diviney

For the last couple of weeks, every morning at 9am, like clockwork, a pit of anxiety and worry has formed in my stomach. For the few seconds that it takes my Twitter page to load the latest set of statistics from NSW Health, I find myself repeating several things in my head like a mantra - or maybe even a prayer. Please let the numbers be low today. Please don’t let too many people be in hospital. I hope no one’s died, I can’t think about empty chairs at family dinners or kids growing up without parents, I just can’t…

Unfortunately, no matter how hard I plead or watch people continue to do the right thing, as no one really dares move or breathe around anyone else (except for elite athletes but that’s another issue), things aren’t getting better. In fact, they’re steadily getting worse. 

How else do you explain the desolation of supermarket shelves as the supply chain snaps? The pressure on our hospitals as staff are forced to go back to work before they themselves are well and ready, just to cope with the demand of all the people who need care in spite of Omicron being billed as a ‘mild’ variant?

I’ve said this on social media and I will say it again, loudly, here. Mild COVID-19 is not the same as mild taco sauce.

This is a disease designed to attack the respiratory system and other organs. For some people that attack will be brief. For others, it will be brutal. Everyone’s bodies and internal systems are going to react differently. That’s why having a public response centred around the fact that ‘everyone’s going to get COVID eventually and should just grin and bear it’ is dangerous. More than that, it’s blatant eugenics, a strategy designed to devalue the lives of disabled people everywhere.

The Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health recently released a pretty damning report that detailed the many ways in which our government’s lack of response (also known as their decision to steer us directly into the iceberg) stands to impact one of the nation’s most vulnerable communities. According to the report, an alarming 16% of disabled people living in residential care have still not received two doses of the vaccine, despite being labelled as Priority Group 1A from the moment the vaccine rollout began.

This is an egregious neglect of duty of care. It leaves many individuals without any line of defence should the people they rely on for care unknowingly contract and spread COVID, something that could more easily be managed if rapid antigen tests were readily available and priority was given to the PCR results of both those living with disabilities and their essential communities.

But this then forces bigger questions: what are we, as disabled people, meant to do if the supports we need to both survive and thrive are disrupted by COVID? Who do we turn to when our support workers are sick? What are they supposed to do in the face of that lost income? Resources and systems need to be put in place. Investments need to be made in qualified manpower and emergency planning. Not tomorrow. Not in a few weeks when we’re supposed to hit the peak of this thing. Now.

Many disabled people also qualify as immunocompromised and even for those who don’t, COVID will be deeply unpleasant. Bodies that already live with base levels of fatigue and pain may react more intensely. This disease will add layers of pressure to people who are already exhausted by the weight of moving through a world not built for them.

Every disabled person deserves a COVID action plan, access to medical equipment, services and counsel. But more than that, we deserve better than having to live with the fear of what this pandemic might do to us - not knowing whether anyone in power even cares at all.