Abstract
The pandemic has disrupted the lives of many globally including persons with disabilities. These disruptions are universal. However, the vulnerable communities are more affected.
The study examines impacts on persons with disabilities to share knowledge and inform interventions that ensure persons with disabilities are supported.
The study is a systematic literature review using different search engines to search for scholarly articles all over the globe.
Persons with disabilities have been negatively impacted in numerous ways: lack of access to healthcare services, inadequate rehabilitation services, increased human rights violation, stigmatization and discrimination, increased risk of dying, being subjected to violence, losing financial income, lack of access to education and treatment, increased in neglect and traumatization, poverty, lack of access to food, decreased in community support; and worse of all, in comparison with the overall population, the death of persons with disabilities during the Covid-19 is higher. These impacts were precipitated by inaccessible built environment and sense of touching, lack of disability sensitive policies, increased prevalence of risk factors, difficulties in adhering to WHO recommendations, pervasiveness of underlying health conditions, lack of disability-friendly information and inclusive intervention, national budget cuts; and poorly funded institutions.
Persons with disabilities have been negatively impacted due to many risk factors peculiar to them.
Author Contributions
Copyright© 2022
Muhammed Yahya.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Competing interests The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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Introduction
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the lives of millions including persons with disabilities Persons with disabilities regardless of where they live encounter similar negative impacts due to many factors that are social, economical; and political in nature such as access to appropriate and timely educational services, disability friendly health information, discrimination, inadequate community support, lack of access to financial support and basic needs The rationale for the literature review is to examine the present scale and degree of the impacts of the Covid-19 on persons with disabilities in order to share knowledge to inform a process that ushers rapid growth from all directions in ensuring that persons with disabilities are supported to access relevant services in this trying moment. A systematic review of the literatures using information collected from different sources namely Google Search Engine, Web of Science; and Scopus. During the search combinations of words and phrases were used to ensure articles reflect the most recent knowledge and scholarly publications. The systematic searches beget varied and voluminous articles which had to be sieved not only to meet the inclusion and exclusion criteria but to ensure the fundamental objectives of the study are attained. Therefore, only peer-reviewed scholarly publications published after 2018 were selected except extracts perceived to be of great value to the study and those published by highly respected international organizations known to have been working in disabilities and pandemics. The following procedures were followed in articles inclusion: it must be peer-reviewed, on disabilities and Covid-19, published from 2019 to 2020, on international or regional perspectives on disabilities and Covid-19; and on disabilities and Covid-19 published by internationals organizations with years of experience. The exclusion criteria was based on articles being non-peer reviewed, published before 2019, media generated; and not published in the English language. In spite of the fact that both qualitative and quantitative articles were trawled, only45 articles were qualified which is due to a dearth of data.