Covid 19 and Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

The pandemic has no doubt caused loss of lives, livelihoods for some and changed all our lifestyle to a certain extent. Singapore, with her strict and reflective management strategies, has attempted to reduce mortalities from COVID 19 infections yet letting the virus living among us.

This is the result of widespread vaccination and social distancing legislation. Here is the current look of things as of 8th December 2021

My work involves more primary care and managing long term care for people with disabilities. In my opinion, one such group has faced more challenges in this pandemic than others. This group is the Persons with Intellectual Disability (PwID). I was fortunate be too able to contribute my efforts in the middle of 2021, going to almost all the special schools to vaccinate their students aged 12 and above.

This vaccination drive is particularly challenging, after I have done vaccinations for the older adults in nursing homes, day care centers and special groups like the Advance Parkinson patients.

Many of this young, fit, very strong special needs children made our vaccination work very difficult.

Then what about doing swabs on them? I have parents of very active PwIDs having huge headaches over how to bring their children for nasal swabbing in clinics.

I do think that doing nasal swabs on them would be very challenging. The best scenario when such efforts are needed will be:

1.??????Have home visits from physicians like me. PwID are generally calmer at home and easy to manage. In fact, using tele consultations for monitoring the sample collection aided by the family might even be better, so there is no foreign person in the home. It is liken our current practice of supervised ART.

2.??????Use noninvasive methods to collect sample. We were lucky to have products such as ?Lucence’s SAFER Sample saliva collection kit inactivates SARS-CoV-2 within 45 seconds of sample collection. This proprietary reagent also stabilizes viral RNA at room temperature for up to one week.?

SAFER Sample kit's viral inactivation capabilities could mean enhanced safety and reduced risk of exposure for any individual involved in the collection, transport, and testing processes.

Using such method can not only support families with PwID through this pandemic. It also makes the work of healthcare workers like me much safer and easier.

I do hope our government will endorse the use of such innovation to support our PwIDs and the PwIDs worldwide.?