Coronavirus Infected With Learning Disabilities Given ‘Do Not Resuscitate Orders’ In Great Britain

general February 15, 2021

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By John Deloria
(General Dispatch) – The Royal Mencap Society, a society for people with learning disabilities said that in January it received reports of people with mental health conditions being told that if they were infected with coronavirus they would not be resuscitated if they needed to be.

Mencap’s chief executive, Edel Harris, assured: “Throughout the pandemic many people with a learning disability have faced shocking discrimination and obstacles to accessing healthcare, with inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices put on their files and cuts made to their social care support,”

“It’s unacceptable that within a group of people hit so hard by the pandemic, and who even before Covid died on average over 20 years younger than the general population, many are left feeling scared and wondering why they have been left out,”

“The JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) and government must act now to help save the lives of some of society’s most vulnerable people by urgently prioritising all people with a learning disability for the vaccine.” Harris concluded.

For now, the statistics also support what Harris has said, some of the data provided are as follows:
- According to Public Health England (PHE), young people between the ages of 18 and 34 with learning disabilities are 30 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than their non-disabled counterparts.
- NHS figures showed that in the first five weeks of the third national lockdown, some 65 percent of deaths of people with learning disabilities were caused by the coronavirus.
- The Office for National Statistics reported that 5.8 per cent of all coronavirus deaths were people with some form of disability, despite only making up 1.2 per cent of the study population.