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People in state government may think I’m tweeting way too much and being way too critical. Here’s my response to that:
1. I got sick back in March. Couldn’t get tested. Ended up at the ER and sent home. Wasn’t sure I was going to survive March and April. But I did!
2. I’m still sick. I burned up all my accumulated sick time before going out on partial long term disability. I’m only working 1/2 time. (Gives me more time to tweet.)
3. I am part of a community that has been left behind this entire pandemic. We saw you provide services and accessibility in ways in which we had been begging to be provided for years, but been denied - then all of a sudden it was happening.
4. We saw lots of committees and working groups and oversight groups created to have a lot of conversations without a lot of representation. (1 person to represent all of us when we are 1 out of 5 in overall population just isn’t good enough.)
5. A lot of the problems you’re encountering in this vaccine rollout are problems are community has been dealing with for years. The stuff many of you don’t need to think about, we live every day. Having more of us around might have raised those issues up earlier.
*Our* I hate typos
6. Bottom line: we’re tired. Remember back last spring when a whole bunch of people were saying “only old people and people with underlying conditions have to worry?” Well, guess what? That’s us. Residents of nursing homes? That’s us too. Younger disabled people exist.
7. Remember all that talk about higher risk in congregate settings? Nursing homes and assisted living facilities are not the only congregate settings. They include jails, prisons, inpatient psychiatric facilities, training schools, group homes...the list goes on.
8. Even now we hear some people refer to elderly housing, where people live in their own apartments, as a congregate setting. While one kind of elderly housing is called congregate housing - that’s not the only kind. All elderly housing in CT is by definition disabled housing too
9. Younger disabled people exist and many of them are at incredibly high risk for COVID-19. Guidelines based solely on age — an age some folks in our community will never reach because they die younger — leave us behind.
10. And that’s leaving aside all the new people we are welcoming to our community as they experience the impact of long haul COVID. People who need accommodations that they might not have needed before, and aren’t getting them.
11. Seriously, do you still wonder why I come across as too critical, too cynical, too angry, too ungrateful? Watching long-standing patterns of policy decisions get repeated in real time gets really old really fast.
