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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is maintaining its position on its new COVID-19 isolation policy, telling people who had symptoms and who have access to a test to be sure to use an antigen test in slightly updated guidance.
The CDC put into place a new policy last week that allows people who have tested positive for the virus to stop isolating after five days as long as they are asymptomatic or don’t have a fever. They are supposed to wear a mask around others for five more days.
The policy change was criticized for not requiring a negative test to leave isolation.
The public-health agency tweaked the guidance on Tuesday, to say that if people can get access to a COVID-19 test and want to test out of their five-day isolation period, they should do so, using an antigen test. This only applies to people who had symptoms, the agency said.
Many at-home antigen tests are sold out in stores or in short supply due to the recent surge in cases driven by the omicron variant. If someone tests positive with an antigen test on day five, the CDC says they should continue to isolate for five more days.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky said the science backs the agency’s decision, based on what we know about when people are able to transmit the virus.
“The vast majority of your transmissibility happens in the day or two before you get symptoms and the two, three days afterwards,” she told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday on “The Late Show.” “So, probably about 80% to 90% of all your transmissibility has happened in those first five days. And we really want people to be sure if they’re going to be home, they’re home for the right period of time when they’re maximally transmissible.”
Other COVID-19 news to know:
• Children made up 17.7% of the new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. during the last week of December, reports CBS News. That’s about 325,000 cases in children between Dec. 23 and Dec. 30. Back in the fall, when the school year started, cases among children also spiked, making up 22.4% of all cases.
• Physicians say fewer COVID-19 patients are ending up in the intensive-care unit, even though the number of hospitalizations is increasing during the omicron wave. “We’re not sending as many patients to the I.C.U., we’re not intubating as many patients, and actually, most of our patients that are coming to the emergency department that do test positive are actually being discharged,” an emergency-room doctor told the New York Times.
• The U.S. ordered an additional 10 million treatment courses of Pfizer’s
PFE,
at-home COVID-19 treatment. This brings the total order to 20 million treatment courses of Paxlovid. The pills, which were authorized last month, are in short supply. “We may need even more,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday. “That’s the estimate we need right now. We’ve already placed the largest order in the world; now I’m doubling that order.”
• The World Health Organization is downplaying concern about the potential impact of a new variant, which was first identified in France in a vaccinated individual who had just returned from Cameroon. A WHO official said Tuesday that the organization is tracking the variant, and “that virus had a lot of chances to pick up,” according to Bloomberg. Details about the variant were first announced in a Dec. 24 preprint.
What the numbers say
The number of new COVID-19 cases was 885,541 on Tuesday, and the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases spiked to 547,613, an increase of 254% over the last two weeks, according to a New York Times tracker. There are currently 114,308 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 1,323 people died on Tuesday. The daily average of hospitalizations jumped to 105,139, up from 97,847 on Monday and 51% above levels seen just two weeks ago
Meanwhile, the number of fully vaccinated Americans grew to 206.58 million, or 62.2% of the population, while the percentage of children aged 5 to 17 years old that are fully vaccinated edged up to 33.6%, according to CDC data. About 35% of people in the U.S. have gotten a booster shot.
—Tomi Kilgore
