The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities stipulates that parties to the convention should use statistical data to formulate and implement policies that “address the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in exercising their rights”. Yet, more than a year into the pandemic, very few public-health or medical institutions are recording the disability status of those who contract COVID-19.
Before the pandemic, an estimated 15% of the global population had a disability (see go.nature.com/3xbjqu3). COVID-19 is now adding to those ranks apace. Even so, most institutions (including US public-health authorities) continue to rely on other statistical indicators — such as the age, sex and ethnicity of those who test positive — in formulating COVID-19 policy.
This dearth of data makes it harder to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on people with disabilities and to study the effects of legal and policy interventions. Australia, for example, does not mention disabled people in its COVID‑19 emergency-response plan (A. Kavanagh et al. Disabil. Health J. 14, 101050; 2021).
When such data do exist, they indicate that disabled people are disproportionately affected. In the United Kingdom, for example, their risk of death from COVID-19 was around 2–3 times higher than that for non-disabled people. Even after normalizing for age, geography, co-morbidities, sex and residence type, a raised risk remained (see go.nature.com/3arf76s).
