Responding to the Needs of People with Disabilities in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Community Perspectives from Centers for Independent Living.

Centers for Independent Living (CILs) are federally funded, community-based organizations designed and operated by people with disabilities that provide individual and systems advocacy, peer support, information and referral, independent living skills training, and transition services throughout the U.S. and its territories. Centers for Independent Living therefore offer a rich and detailed perspective on the needs of people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this brief report, we summarize COVID-19-related issues raised by 144 CIL administrators and staff in a national survey conducted in April and May 2020 and discuss their research and policy implications. Respondents voiced concerns about health and safety, long-term supportive services, social isolation, and economic insecurity. In the words of one center director, "The pandemic has pulled back the curtain on the depth of need in our local disability community."

Disability Rights During COVID-19: Emergency Law and Guidelines in England.

Disabled people may be disproportionately impacted by the response to the COVID-19 outbreak because of the kinds of countermeasures needed to tackle it, and serious disruptions to the services on which they rely. There are reports from the disability community in England and elsewhere that measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 impact negatively on their human rights and experiences. This commentary focuses on the healthcare and social care systems in England and describes how laws and practices have changed under the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these changes affect the rights of disabled people.

Disability, Ethics, and Health Care in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This article considers key ethical, legal, and medical dilemmas arising for people with disabilities in the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight the limited application of existing frameworks of emergency planning with and for people with disabilities in the COVID-19 pandemic, explore key concerns and issues affecting the health care of people with disabilities (i.e., access to information and clinician-patient communication, nondiscrimination and reasonable accommodations, and rationing of medical goods), and indicate possible solutions. Finally, we suggest clinical and public health policy measures to ensure that people with disabilities are included in the planning of future pandemic-related efforts.The devastation evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic raises challenging dilemmas in bioethics. It also speaks to social justice issues that have plagued historically marginalized communities in the United States.Responses to the pandemic must be bound by legal standards, principles of distributive justice, and societal norms of protecting vulnerable populations-core commitments of public health-to ensure that inequities are not exacerbated, and should provide a pathway for improvements to ensure equitable access and treatment in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the human rights of persons with mental and cognitive impairments subject to coercive powers in Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the human rights of persons with mental and cognitive impairments subject to coercive powers in Australia. It sets out the relevant human rights in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which have been engaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and the government's response to it. It examines the effect of emergency legislation on the relaxation of human rights safeguards in mental health laws, with a focus on mental health tribunals (although it is limited by a lack of published decisions and gaps in publicly available information). However, some of the issues created for persons with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic are evident in some decisions published by the New South Wales Guardianship Tribunal. The paper critically analyses two guardianship decisions UZX [2020] NSWCATGD 3 (3 April, 2020) and GZK [2020] NSWCATGD 5 (23 April, 2020) and some emergency South Australian legislation COVID-19 Emergency Response Act, 2020 (SA) Schedule 1 to demonstrate the ways in which the human rights of persons with mental and cognitive impairments can be more at risk than those of the general population, even when the general population is itself in "lockdown."