How Living Arrangements Shaped COVID Risks for People with Disabilities in Scotland

Researchers looked at everyone aged 16 and over who lived in Scotland on March 1, 2020. They used the 2011 census to flag who had an intellectual disability, who had a physical or sensory disability but no intellectual disability, and who had neither. The last group served as the baseline for comparison. All together, more than 3.7 million people were included.

Where people lived was also sorted into three types: regular houses, small communal places with fewer than fifty residents, and large communal places with fifty or more residents. The study then tracked who got a confirmed COVID test, who ended up in hospital because of COVID, and who died from COVID between March 1, 2020 and April 30, 2022.

Using Cox models, the team calculated hazard ratios for each combination of disability status and living setting. They checked whether the effect of disability on infection, hospitalization, or death changed depending on the setting. For recorded infection, the interaction was positive on both multiplicative and additive scales, and the multiplicative test was significant (chi‑square with four degrees of freedom equals 541.42, p < 0.0…).

In plain words, the extra risk tied to disability was stronger when people lived in shared homes rather than in their own houses. The pattern held for both the multiplication and addition ways of measuring interaction.