Access to food and health care during the COVID-19 pandemic by disability status in the United States

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people's access to food and health care. People with disabilities may be disproportionately affected by these outcomes due to structural and social barriers.

Objective/hypothesis: To examine the relative prevalence of food insufficiency and unmet health care needs among the U.S. residents by vision, hearing, cognition, and mobility disability.

Methods: We used data from the Household Pulse Survey wave conducted from April 14 to April 26, 2021, when questions about functional disability were first included. Participants were asked about difficulty seeing, hearing, remembering or concentrating, and walking or climbing stairs. The outcomes of interest were food insufficiency, delaying needed medical care and not getting needed medical care. Poisson regression models with robust variance adjusted for potential confounders were used to examine the prevalence ratio of each of these outcomes by disability status in separate models for each type of disability.

Results: During April 14-26, 2021, 39.5% adults in the U.S. reported cognitive disability, 30.8% reported vision disability, 23.2% reported mobility disability, and 14.9% reported hearing disability. Adults with any type of disability were more likely than those without to experience food insufficiency (range of prevalence rate ratios [PRR]: 1.67-1.96), and delay (range of PRR: 1.48-1.87) or not get (range of PRR: 1.60-2.07) needed medical care.

Conclusions: These disparities suggest there is an urgent need to address the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with disabilities. The prioritization of disability data collection is key in achieving that goal.