CDC ditches 5-day COVID isolation, argues COVID is becoming flu-like
COVID-19 is becoming more like the flu and, as such, no longer requires its own virus-specific health rules, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday alongside the release of a unified "respiratory virus guide."
In a lengthy background document, the agency laid out its rationale for consolidating COVID-19 guidance into general guidance for respiratory viruses—including influenza, RSV, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, and others, though specifically not measles. The agency also noted the guidance does not apply to health care settings and outbreak scenarios.
"COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV," the agency wrote.
The most notable change in the new guidance is the previously reported decision to no longer recommend a minimum five-day isolation period for those infected with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the new isolation guidance is based on symptoms, which matches long-standing isolation guidance for other respiratory viruses, including influenza.
Fwiw, they mostly did, it's just that it is no longer restricted solely to COVID and now is shared with others.
e.g. stating that people should "take precautions", which if someone can work from home could be that, and/or wearing masks if not, etc. Unfortunately, not everyone (single mothers?) has the luxury of taking a week off whenever they want or even NEED to.
Also, this is just a guess but I am fairly positive that this is based on all the EXTREME amount of push-back that they have been putting up with from Republicans over the last few years to CONTINUALLY get all up in their business, despite barely having finished a high school's worth of edumacashiun. And probably also, to an enormously lesser degree, from Democrats who want to push the "pandemic is solved, b/c Biden won the last election" message that they believe will resonate with the handful of centrist people left in the country.
So this is once again a symptom of late-stage capitalism, where obstructionists shoot the department in the head, then complain how "ineffective" it is after that.
On the other hand, employers will take this to mean 'come in or else,' even if WFH is an option. I know for a fact that my previous hybrid job that claimed they were doing whatever the CDC suggested would interpret this as 'you can come into the office after 24 hours of the symptoms ending.' I guarantee you that they would be far from alone.
So yeah, this would help those single mothers. This will also spread a lot more COVID and possibly kill those single mothers.
First, this is (legit!) the first I am hearing about a job that actually pays attention to the advice of CDC. For multiple YEARS now we have been inundated by stories of corps that have ignored that, time and again, sometimes being more lenient than normal (e.g. allowing WFH 100% of the time) while other times being far less. I am saying that this "advice" from the CDC was never binding to begin with. I wonder how normal that situation you describe is? Maybe it is far more common than our media sources have led us to believe?
Second, they still say to "take precautions", which now is expanded to include other respiratory viruses that can likewise kill - e.g. more severe flus that can be damaging especially to the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.
I haven't even mentioned how the variants have changed the scope of the situation, and/or what expectations there are in the coming months (perhaps, although this article did not tell us, this merely describes the baseline but there may be special alerts during peak times and/or irt special variants that would modify this advice, specially to those particular circumstances?). I was just presuming that they, being the CDC, know more than me, who to be absolutely clear, does not have an M.D.
What I do know is that Republicans kept HOUNDING the agency, DEMANDING that they explain every tiny little thing down to the smallest detail, all without paying the slightest attention to its responses - i.e. like a DDoS attack, it just became another form of harassment that wasted an enormous fraction of their budget every year - it's the election counting scenario all over again. Also, I note that despite the federal fiscal budget year having begun back on October 1, we are now IN THE SIXTH MONTH of that fiscal year, but still with no fiscal budget. i.e., the CDC, like every other federal agency, has come upon hard times. Will their budget increase (which seems as likely as flaming monkeys suddenly flying out of my butt), or will it be cut by some amount (i.e. they cannot really hire anyone until they know for sure), or will it be constrained to remain the same (which puts it into a legal quandary, b/c iirc there is some legal stipulation that federal staff salaries always have to increase by a certain amount each year, which was intended to help them keep pace with inflation although who are we kidding about keeping up with THAT in the modern era? but still, they HAVE to do it... except they CAN'T do it, if they are not given the funds, and to make matters worse, whatever budget eventually does get past the Congressional Obstructionist Wall will have to work retroactively back to have began on October 1... or something like that anyway).
So the CDC caved, it seems, yet managed to preserve its integrity in the process, by both keeping its standards within the realm of correct medicinal advice, while moving forward in a way as to "first do no harm" to those who would continue to be negatively impacted by it remaining under attack from Congress. Single mothers may die, yes, but that is not something that I would lay all of the blame at their feet for. With a gun to their head, and another one aimed at their crotch, they made a decision to move forward as best they could. I am not saying that blame should not be involved here, but I am saying that we should forget who did this to us all: conservatives. The CDC itself imho held up admirably, given what conditions they were operating under. If we want them to perform better in the future, perhaps we should exempt them from Congressional oversight, and allow doctors to give medical advice without having to pay overtures to powerful white geriatric men who for whatever reason continue to hold their strategy session get-togethers in Moscow even after it invaded Ukraine. i.e., look at what happened to the Post Office, and the IRS - it is remarkable to me that the CDC is one of the last bastions of government from the Golden Era of ye olden socialist (aka "sharing is caring") United States that is actually most of the way functional. Like, if my car ran out of gas and then managed to limp along another 100 miles, I wouldn't be blaming the car for refusing to go any further! Instead, I'd be praising how well it managed to perform in such a difficult scenario.
I worked for a company that absolutely took Covid seriously. If you went into the office, you walked through a visual IR scanner to make sure you did not have a fever. Conference rooms that could house 12 were restricted to for people with masks (nobody used the rooms). Anyone that came in had to check off that they sterilized their desk before leaving. The production line was masked up and properly distanced. I don't know anyone in the building that died of COVID which seemed to be an extreme rarity in manufacturing. I visited a biopharma company and the first day I was there someone swung by to mention that one of their coworkers just died of COVID. They had a mask policy but it was also Indianapolis so masks outside of that workplace were pretty few and far between.
My company still requires regular testing and notifies of cases. In a company of ~100 or so employees I get an email every other week or so notifying of a new case. When the new CDC recommendation was brought up in our department meeting of scientists and engineers the reaction was bemused laughter and my boss immediately said "well, we're definitely not doing that".
Much better than Tyson Foods that wrote the executive order to stay open during the pandemic, ignored masking, and made bets on how many of their workers would die.
LOL, what? This is absolutely not correct medicinal advice. Doctors and scientists have been telling them that since the shortening to 5 days. You yourself say you don't know what correct advice is earlier in this comment.
No they didn't. 5 days of "normal activities with precautions" is not 5 days of "isolation".
And the core problem is that 5 days was already not scientific and "fever" isn't an indicator of infectiousness at all, it's just a symptom that some infectious people experience for some of their infectious period.
From https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35853589/:
"We showed that among the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant infected patients, viral shedding continues for ≥10 days in 13.5% of all cases and 11% in symptom-free cases. The decision for cessation of isolation according to the presence of symptoms could be reconsidered until further studies disapprove of our results."
The CDC changing he recommendation doesn't do anything for people who might need to leave the house for supplies or to pick up a child. They already could and would do that, because a recommendation to private citizens is just a recommendation. Where it matters is that it removes liability from their employers and "lets" them work, but that's only "helpful" because so many people are desperately poor and they haven't mandated paid sick leave when people have infectious diseases. This is the sort of "helping workers" where the help is just because they do absolutely nothing to require humane conditions from their employers. Taking a week off to not infect your fellow workers shouldn't be a "luxury".
Except that is not what is being reported, it not what managers will enforce, and it’s not what most people will do. It’s a poor decision because adding nuance will just make people ignore what they want to.
(1) Companies are going to do whatever they want, regardless; (2) the CDC "advice" was never anywhere close to binding; (3) they are real doctors - they know more about COVID and also other respiratory diseases than any of us here; but mostly what I wanted to say is (4) they did not make this decision entirely in isolation of all of the facts. They had a gun to their head, and it seems like they tried to do the best they were able given the circumstances.
But yes, I hear you, it is another victory for conservatives - and for some strange reason most Democrats as well - who want to pretend that the pandemic never happened. But it is not anywhere close to as bad as could have happened.