As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?
By Joseph Shapiro
December 14, 2020
On the morning of April 21, Sarah McSweeney woke up with a temperature of 103 degrees — and it kept rising. Staff at her group home worried that the woman with multiple disabilities — she couldn’t walk or speak words — had contracted COVID-19. They got her into her bright pink wheelchair and hurried to the hospital, just a block down the street from the group home in Oregon City, Ore.
That afternoon, Heidi Barnett got a phone call from the doctor in the emergency room.