The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out new guidelines for the national response to COVID-19 on Thursday.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out new guidelines for the national response to COVID-19 on Thursday.
Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images
As the coronavirus continues to spread widely across the country, Americans are getting new advice from federal health officials about how to live with the virus.
The revised guidance — released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday — removes the requirement to quarantine if exposed to the virus, emphasizes screening people without symptoms and updates COVID-19 protocols in schools, eliminating a recommendation for testing in- stay behind potential exposure.
“This guidance recognizes that the pandemic is not over, but it also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” CDC’s Greta Massetti said in a statement. “We know that COVID 19 is here to stay,” she added in comments during a conference call with reporters.
The update isn’t necessarily a major overhaul of existing guidelines, but it does represent an increased focus on individuals making their own decisions about their level of risk and how they want to mitigate that risk, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer. for the Association of State and Territory Health Officials.
“This is consistent with where we are in the pandemic right now,” he said. “I don’t think there are many state or local jurisdictions that think they’re going to need to start doing mandates.”
It also brings the recommendations for unvaccinated people in line with people who are fully vaccinated — a recognition of the high levels of immunity in the U.S. population, due to vaccination, past COVID-19 infections, or both. “Based on the most recent data, it’s about 95% of the population,” Massetti said, “And so it makes more sense not to differentiate,” since many people have some protection against serious disease.
The changes may have the biggest impact on K-12 schools. The guidance eliminates the strategy known as “test-to-stand” — a testing schedule for people who were exposed to the coronavirus but not up to date on their vaccines — that allowed them to continue learning in person, as long as they it continued to be negative and showed no symptoms.
The stay-test protocol has been an alternative to school quarantine, so now “the practice of dealing with exposures would involve masking rather than quarantine,” Massetti said.
