Despite living with chronic illness and disability, the Jesmond NDIS recipient has been unable to get help to collect food and prescriptions, prepare meals, and ensure she has clean clothes to wear and sheets to sleep on.

Miss Caine said disability services should not have to compete with businesses and the general public for RATs to keep both their workers and their clients safe from COVID-19, but they were.

"I am mostly house-bound," Miss Caine said. "My Hireup support workers have had some close calls with COVID. But because we can't get hold of any of these RATs - they haven't been able to clear themselves. So the only option was to do the safe thing - which was not come."

Miss Caine said there had been a lot of "desperate triaging" to weigh up how to best use her limited support.

"People with disabilities are described as having special needs," she said. "We have the same needs everyone else has - to be able to eat meals and communicate with our families and wear clean underpants. We just need some assistance to get it. If you take away that assistance by not providing the resources required to do it safely, it is cruel, and it's unnecessary. For me, one month of this is unpleasant, but doable. But there is no sign of this ending. No sign of these resources."

She feared for those on the NDIS who required 24-hour care who might suffer because their support workers were either isolating, COVID-positive, or could not mitigate their risk because of limited access to RATs.

People with disabilities were already more vulnerable to severe illness from COVID-19.

"Care is not optional, it's not something we can skip," she said. "Without support workers being able to be certain they are not infected, you end up with some terrible decisions to make.

"Do I want to run the risk? Or do I just go without the support and suffer the quality of life problems?"

One of Miss Caine's illnesses began with a post-viral infection.

"I don't know if the chances of me having long term consequences if I get COVID are any higher than anyone else's, but I'm not really willing to roll the dice on it," she said. "Rapid tests should be free and available to every single Australian so we can manage our own risk, but especially anyone who is a frontline health worker, aged care worker, or disability support worker. We don't have a choice in getting care, we need it, and our carers need to be able to take care of themselves and us."

Andrew Thomas, of online disability support platform, Hireup, said the sector was in crisis, being unable to source rapid antigen tests. He said it was leaving those living with a disability without access to vital support services.

"We need priority access to rapid antigen tests to screen our support workers to ensure they are not putting clients at risk, many of whom are immunocompromised," he said.

"Without access to these rapid tests our clients have not been able to access the services they need, leaving them confined to their homes without support.

"Disability service providers are being forced to compete for rapid antigen tests alongside other businesses and the public, which is unforgivable. Furthermore, we are not being afforded priority access to the national stockpile, unlike some aged-care counterparts, and we are seeing those living with disability becoming further isolated within our communities as a result." He said the government had a responsibility to make RATs accessible and affordable for people living with disability.