Pa. residents with disabilities worry coronavirus rationing will deem them expendable
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/04/p ... dable.html
Some might consider it far-fetched for people with disabilities to fear they won’t be given a ventilator if they’re near death because of COVID-19. Or that the ventilator they use daily might be given to someone else if they are critically ill and resources are scarce.
But such possibilities don’t feel far-fetched to those who live their lives struggling against people and policies that devalue them or treat them as expendable.
“It’s always in the back of my mind — will they value me as a woman, as a wife, as a mother, as a professional? Or will I be looked at differently because I have a disability?,” says Shona Eakin, 50, who lives in Erie County and has cerebral palsy. “It’s a fear. It’s a fear generated by experience.”
That fear has escalated as the exponential rise in critically-ill COVID-19 patients threatens to overwhelm the supply of ventilators and intensive care beds. Suddenly, there’s serious discussion of how to choose who gets life-saving equipment and care when there’s no longer enough to go around.
“That keeps us up at night,” says German Parodi, 35, a Philadelphia-area resident and quadriplegic.
Government officials from the Trump administration on down have been side-stepping the issue, stressing the way to prevent such worst-case scenarios is for everyone to follow social distancing practices intended to limit spread of the coronavirus and minimize the number of people who need hospitalization and intensive care.
At the same time, it’s clear state officials and hospital administrators around the country are circulating policies for the rationing of ventilators and ICU beds
There are signs such situations are near, if not already happening. The Washington Post this week reported that some New York City hospitals, flooded with critically-ill coronavirus cases, have told staff not to resuscitate some patients, such as those in cardiac arrest. At another hospital, doctors were cleared to designate, based on their own judgment, certain patients as “do-not-resuscitate” or “do-not-intubate,” the Post reported.
For people with disabilities, the frightening possibilities became vivid as it recently came to light that some states have policies that name disabilities as possible criteria for deciding who gets a ventilator.
Pam Auer, who has spina bifida, rejects such criteria for many reasons, including the fact people with disabilities have histories of beating the odds and proving doctors wrong.
“Look how many healthy people are dying [of COVID-19],” says Auer, the director of Living Well With A Disability at Center for Independent Living of Central PA. “We’ve lived this long. Give us a chance.”
