As 2022 begins I sit here not long out of isolating after being a symptomatic close COVID contact on Christmas day and I wonder, what have we actually learned from this pandemic in the past two years. Because as a person with a disability, and as one of the vulnerable people in our society, I started this year feeling like I was not a valued member of our community but an expendable one. We have gone from ‘we are all in this together’ to ‘you are on your own’ and ‘let it rip’. The fabric of our government and our society is threaded with the notion that the vulnerable and disabled are less than. How can I make such a claim? Recently when doing some research, I discovered that the Australian Government has not bothered keeping statistics on the percentage of people with disability who have tested positive or died from COVID. Even after the Royal Commission recommended that they do so. This speaks quite loudly to how much the Australian Government actually cares about its vulnerable and disabled community when they can’t even be bothered to understand how much we are being affected. The lack of information available, lack of discussion or consideration from the Government for the vulnerable and disabled during any COVID conversation is shocking – Even while we are constantly being listed as the most at risk in the population. It feels hypocritical, doesn’t it? Left twisting in the wind as policies to protect us are stripped away and we are unable to access clear information on what to do. The defeatist narrative of the ‘let it rip’ strategy along with the ‘oh well, everyone is going to get it’ approach disregards the lives of the vulnerable and disabled. We are just seen as the collateral damage, the acceptable loss. At the start of January, the Government announced changes to the Supervised Quarantine Direction, now allowing those who work in supervised quarantine to work in other high-risk settings. In New South Wales, healthcare workers who are asymptomatic have been told they could be exempt from quarantine requirements and could return to work despite being positive.
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