Covid-19 patients no longer require testing to complete isolation

According to federal health officials, most Americans who have recovered from Covid-19 can get out of isolation without further testing to show that they do not carry the coronavirus.

Alternatively, a patient may be considered to be recovering if 10 days have passed since he first felt sick. Symptoms such as shortness of breath and diarrhea disappeared. And they haven’t had fever for 24 hours without taking antipyretics.

of New recommendations It is not a rule, but a guideline for patients, doctors and health policy makers. According to the Center’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the amendment should help ease the burden on national testing systems.

Previously, one way to get out of isolation was to run the virus for two negative diagnostic tests (also called PCR tests) 24 hours apart. However, there are now up to two weeks’ testing delays in parts of the country, and many studies show that people with mild illness are rarely infected 10 days after symptoms begin.

Public health experts generally agreed that the changes were safe.

“This is rooted in evidence,” said Dr Wafael Saddle, a professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “I think it makes sense.”

Nursing homes and hospitals are likely to experience the greatest impact of this change, said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

For example, many nursing homes do not accept hospitalized elderly patients until they pass two diagnostic tests after recovery. As a result, he said hospital stays could increase for several weeks because of no medical reason.

Previous separation guidelines were more conservative. When the disease first appeared in China, all patients with the disease (even in mild cases) were immediately separated from their families for 14 days and were not released until two PCR tests were negative.

But science is changing and the situation in the United States is different. In this country, most people with illnesses quarantine themselves at home, despite the risk of acquiring a family infection.

Many diagnostic tests remain positive for weeks after the patient has fully recovered. Experts now believe that these tests are in response to dead viral fragments that are still being cleared by the body, rather than live viruses that can infect others.

The guidelines also say that people who know that they have recovered from a Covid-19 infection do not need to be re-examined or go into quarantine, even if they are exposed to another infected person. States.

The demand for testing was so high and the delays were so long that it seemed pointless to need it anymore.

According to the new CDC guidelines, severely ill people need more time to get rid of the virus and have to quarantine themselves for up to 20 days, but they should seek medical advice.

People who are positive but have never experienced symptoms may leave the quarantine 10 days after the first positive test.

The new quarantine guidelines do not affect those who are required to quarantine themselves for 14 days after arriving in a new state or country or after being exposed to known cases for 14 days.

This guideline is based on the maximum latency of the virus (the time between infection and first symptoms), not the recovery time.

However, some experts speculated that the new changes could ultimately lead to shorter isolation times.

Such changes may be based on scientific evidence. “But the decision to quarantine foreign visitors may ultimately be made in collaboration with the US Department of State, and there may be other considerations,” said Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine. Said Dr. Peter Hotez.