DSRF is primarily a service provider, but this issue very quickly became a pressing issue for our community. We took the opportunity to use our leading voice to assist our community, and a population, as I mentioned, that's often overlooked, to raise attention to the fact that it's a uniquely vulnerable population. Even within the general developmental disability community, it's a smaller subset because of the comorbidities that go hand in hand with the genetic condition that is Down syndrome. As I mentioned, they're four times more likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to die if they contract COVID-19, and because of their associated disabilities they're increasingly more likely to contract the disease.
The challenge we identified very early on was that the focus was simply on people who were dying, understandably, and that's who needed to be protected. But we quickly tried to shift the focus to the fact that if we didn't do something to prioritize uniquely vulnerable groups, and if they weren't unusually isolated in a way that many families would say, as it extended, bordered on cruelty, they would eventually be the next victims in a second, third or fourth wave. The only reason, again, we haven't seen that is they've been extremely isolated. We need to shift how we are viewing these priorities.
One of the key issues we've had is that despite Down syndrome being a very well known but smaller disability, there's often this gatekeeping that comes up. Persons with disabilities find this problem a lot, where they have to do an unusual amount of proving that they have a disability. There were unique vulnerabilities that we felt, at the beginning, should have been easily identified by the medical community and national leading organizations that focus on immunization priorities, and a recognition that some of the larger questions were more complicated. I would describe it, frankly, as low-hanging fruit; and Down syndrome would be one of those disabilities that could have easily been identified long before it was. The community should not have had to fight for the vulnerability that was so obvious, not just to people in the communities themselves, but in the broader community as well, generally speaking.