Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
And the CDC now only recommends a 5 day isolation period if asymptomatic (followed by 5 days of wearing masks around others):
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2...-guidance.html
I'm not sure if the evidence is strong enough to warrant this but clearly they're bowing to political pressures. |
This is amusing since there was so much pushback on here recently around dialing back isolation protocols, which in many settings are very likely now causing more harm than the virus itself. A lot of the harms of isolation are being mitigated by a lack of testing capacity and people not bothering to get tested. I'd guess that around here if we could test everybody somehow, and followed the official protocols, the economy would pretty much shut down (and I think the federal sick pay may still be on the books so we'd accumulate even more debt).
It's perfectly reasonable that maybe in some setting you want to be 99% relative reduction of transmission but in another setting, 90% relative reduction might be OK, and imposing another 5-9 days of isolation might not be worth that last 10%. And we have to accept that a lot of cases aren't caught so imposing long isolation periods might take us from say 20% mitigation of spread to 21%. It could have virtually no impact on the eventual course of the pandemic. A lot of pandemic measures have this flavour, where there is some point of leverage for public officials so they max out the pain in that group for marginal gain while ignoring the other 80% and achieving mediocre to poor outcomes overall.