“Disabled In NYC : #MyCovidStory”

Rebelwheels appear in a collage in which she breathes fire, with multicolor hair and wearing a horned French beret with the words "resisto", "power", "heart", "mouth", "soul", "love" pasted around her.

In her blog entry “Disabled In NYC : #MyCovidStory?,” Rebelwheels NYC aka Michelle Kaplan discusses her reality during COVID as a disabled person receiving services at home, losing her usual CDPA home aides over a lack of resources, and contracting COVID from the ones sent by a more traditional agency. Published in October 2021, the article questions the absence of mandatory COVID testing for any of home healthcare workers offering service to disabled New Yorkers in their home. This leads the author to talk about the ableist framework through which COVID management functions at the state level. As she compares her situation to the one of people in nursing homes with no possibility of physical distancing, and where one-third of the deaths happened in New York, she expresses her fear of the triage protocols and condemns the austerity politics which collectively led us in this crisis. —Yan Grenier