[Comment] Priority is not equity: lessons from COVID-19 for people with severe mental illness

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic did not create the physical health inequalities encountered by people with severe mental illness (SMI). Long before SARS-CoV-2 emerged, this population faced one of the widest mortality gaps in medicine, losing 10–20 years of life expectancy, largely because of preventable physical illnesses rather than psychiatric disease itself.1 COVID-19 exposed the persistence of this pre-existing vulnerability and tested whether health systems could respond differently when individuals at highest risk were explicitly prioritised.