Living with Covid-19 - End of restrictions
Today marks the first day in nearly two years that no laws will be in place in England to deal with the spread of Covid-19.
The Prime Minster announced the plan for living with Covid-19. This means that nearly all the remaining Covid-19 restrictions will be ended by Friday 1 April 2022.
The timetable for the ending of restrictions is:
Monday 21 February
- Guidance for staff and students in most education and childcare settings to undertake twice weekly asymptomatic testing is removed
Thursday 24 February
- Legal requirement to self-isolate after testing positive for Covid-19 is removed, but people are still advised to isolate
- Vaccinated contacts of positive Covid-19 cases will no longer be asked to test for seven days
- No longer a legal requirement for close contacts who are not vaccinated to self-isolate
- Contact tracing will end; therefore, you will no longer be contacted by NHS Test and Trace to inform you if you were near someone who tested positive for Covid
Thursday 24 March
- From this date you will no longer be able to claim statutory sick pay for testing positive for Covid-19
- Wider guidance on workplace safety that been changed for Covid will be updated. This is likely to mean that the requirement for employers to explicitly consider Covid-19 in their risk assessments will be removed and the existing working safely guidance will be replaced with new public health guidance
Friday 1 April
- Free Lateral Flow Testing will no longer be available to the general public, instead they will be targeted at the most vulnerable residents
- The use of voluntarily NHS Covid passes will also no longer be recommended