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Summary box Social empathy is ‘the ability to more deeply understand people by perceiving or experiencing their life situations and as a result gain insight into structural inequalities and disparities’.1 Social empathy comprises three elements: individual empathy, contextual understanding and social responsibility.1 COVID-19 has created a population-wide experience of exclusion that is only usually experienced by subgroups of the general population.2 Notably, persons with disability, in their everyday lives, commonly experience many of the phenomena that have only recently been experienced by members of the general population. Although about 1 billion people or approximately 15% of the world’s population, have some form of disability, ignorance and fear about disability and discrimination towards people with disability still persists.3 Public understanding of disability is shaped by a medical model of individual deficit, ignoring societal barriers that transpose the attribute of some type of psychological or bodily impairment into the social experience of …