Disabled communities in East have 'growing concerns' over lifting of Covid restrictions
All coronavirus restrictions have been lifted in England today
People with disabilities in the East of England have told us they're concerned about the lifting of coronavirus restrictions across the country from this morning.
As of today you have no legal requirement to self-isolate if you test positive for Covid.
The advice remains for now though to stay at home for five days.
Support payments for those with Covid-19 are also being cut back.
Ben Reed is Chief Executive of the charity Equal Lives, which is run for and by disabled people in Norfolk and Suffolk.
It advocates for the rights of the disabled across the region.
He fears vulnerable people will continue to isolate and limit their experiences with the outside world, due to fears of catching Covid-19.
Ben told us: "The only thing that is helping some of those people in reducing that anxiety, were the measures that that were in place. Taking them away, I have no doubt, is going to reduce the amount of people who are able to access the general Community.
"The best outcome is that they can't access the community, and at worst that they may not be able to get out of their beds in the morning and do anything."
Due to the pandemic there is also a national shortage of carers.
Many do not want to risk catching Covid themselves, meaning quality of life for disabled people has already decreased.
"Essentially people use carers for for all sorts of different aspects of of their lives, but...some of them will be going out, without personal care, potentially because they can't can't access carriers" Ben said.
Ben also fears many will be more relunctant about leaving their homes: "It could be really, really scary going out. And I know lots of people personally, who really struggled with making decisions to go back to their their lives before.
"There are still a lot of people who've who've made very difficult decisions to put themselves at risk, so that their families can can access things or they can access things and lots of other people who have decided they, they can't even do that and that they need to stay at home."
Ben also says that many in the disabled community have felt forgotten through out the pandemic.
"All of those people have just been completely ignored in favour of making a short term kind of decision that benefits people who who don't wear masks.
"What we were hoping for was that the government would actually put in some sensible measures to reduce the risk we we know they can't get rid of COVID completely, but it seems silly to, for instance, get rid of wearing masks in shops, which doesn't inconvenience people in a in a huge way and and self isolation.
"And I think the other thing that, we were really hoping for both, both as a a disability rights organization and and also as an employer is a change in attitude to kind of illness in the workplace and illness outside of your home that wouldn't it be better if the flu didn't have to go round the office and infects everybody, especially when it might kill someone.
"It just feels like a real opportunity missed to make the workplace safer for disabled people, and reduce the amount of death, that Covid is is going to cause.
"We also spoke to Ben about how this decision could affect the disabled communities ability to work and if there was concern they would be penalised for choosing to stay at home
"That's the problem. I think rather than managing this through legislation and managing this through protecting peoples rights, we're being asked to do things based on an individual's responsibility, and that seems to be at odds with the science of a virus...
"Everybody is being asked to to behave responsibly, but it only takes one person to not beside, behave responsibly to infect 100 people.
"We are asking employers to behave responsibly when we know for a fact that lots of employers don't behave responsibly.
"We're asking employees to to be supportive of disabled staff when we know that lots of employers already aren't supportive of disabled staff."