Early findings from the National Commission on Covid-19, Disablism and Systemic Racism, led by the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group, have outlined people’s negative experiences.
Problems include a lack of accessible information and assumptions that family members would step in to help when lockdowns led to people losing care and support.
One care worker told the commission they believed that people’s “very poor outcomes” were “not only due to their learning disability but also possibly due to their ethnicity”.
The commission’s report will be published by the summer.
Although the Covid public inquiry is under way, it is not due to investigate structural racism. This is despite the fact that people from minority ethnic backgrounds were more likely to die from the virus.
