Coronavirus’s forgotten victims

I am hearing stories about people with disabilities that make me feel ill. Visitors to care homes (parents and siblings, usually) tell me they cannot go inside. Fair enough, given the risks of coronavirus spreading you might say. But some homes are not allowing parents to wave at their children through the window or meet them at a safe social distance when they are released from lockdowns lasting 23 hours a day for a brief walk, assuming they are allowed a walk at all.

Severely autistic people, who understand little, think their parents are dead or have abandoned them. They are injuring themselves and falling into deep depressions. My sources won’t go on the record. But Harriet Harman, the chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights talked this week of the ‘great suffering’ of those being locked in solitary confinement, alone and vulnerable to abuse. The committee wanted to know whether homes were using restraints and lockdown to contain them, although how it will find out is anyone’s guess.