dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on CBS Mornings Friday that the CDC has not turned its recommendations around Covid-19 isolation., but instead offered guidance for those who chose to take an antigen test.
“I remind you that isolation is for people who have had a positive test,” she said when asked about changes to isolation guidelines. “We now have dozens of articles now on our CDC website that we have reviewed to update these guidelines in the context of the science and epidemiology of our time.”
She said it is known that the one to two days prior to infection and two to three days after symptoms are the time when a person is maximally contagious. By day five, after symptoms, “most of that contagiousness, that contagiousness is really behind you,” she said.
“That’s really where we say, do you have symptoms? If your symptoms are better, you can safely go outside as long as you wear a mask all the time,” she said. “What we’ve heard over the past week is that a lot of people were interested in using an antigen test, they had access to the antigen test.”
“So we didn’t change our recommendations, but we did provide guidance on how you would use and interpret that antigen test, if you chose to go the extra mile to get one,” she said. “And that is, if it’s positive, stay home. And if it’s negative, please keep wearing your mask, because that doesn’t mean you’re not contagious anymore.”
When asked whether testing would be necessary before leaving the isolation if testing is generally available and access is not an issue, Walensky said that “we need testing to get out of quarantine — quarantine is this period after you’ve been exposed. that is, we need to provide guidance that is, you know, based on science, that is based on the epidemiology of our present moment, and that is implementable at the state and local jurisdiction level.”
“If they can’t get a test, they should wear a mask,” Walensky said, when asked what people who couldn’t get a test after five days of isolation should do. “And that’s actually really what our guidance says, isolate those first five days, after those first five days, make sure you feel better, if you feel better then you can really go out, but you have to go out and you have to wearing your mask all the time.”
Walensky also criticized communicating the guidelines, saying, “We’re working 24/7, 12,000 people to keep America safe, to update our guidelines in the context of really fast-moving science and really fast-moving epidemiology. We “We’ve got room, we can improve our communication about how we’re getting that science to the American people. We’ll continue to do this. We’ve had some criticism, but we’ve also gotten quite a bit of approval for this new guidance.”
