The nation’s top public health agency loosened its COVID-19 guidelines on Thursday, dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into contact with an infected person.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people no longer need to keep at least 6 feet away from others.
The changes, which come more than 2 1/2 years after the pandemic began, are motivated by the realisation that an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either through vaccination or infection, according to agency officials.
“The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years,” said the CDC’s Greta Massetti, an author of the guidelines.
Many places across the country have long abandoned social distancing and other once-common precautions, but some of the changes may be especially significant for schools, which resume classes in many parts of the country this month.
Perhaps the most significant education-related change is the removal of the recommendation that schools conduct routine daily testing, though officials say that practise can be reinstated in certain situations during an outbreak of infections.
The CDC also dropped a “test-to-stay” recommendation, which stated that students exposed to COVID-19 could be tested on a regular basis rather than quarantined at home in order to continue attending school. With no longer being recommended for quarantine, the testing option vanished.
Masks are still recommended only in areas where community transmission is high or if a person is at high risk of severe illness.
Even before the latest guidance was issued, school districts across the country reduced their COVID-19 precautions. Some have promised a return to pre-pandemic educational standards.
When classes resume this fall, most districts will make masks optional, and some of the nation’s largest districts have reduced or eliminated COVID-19 testing requirements.
The Los Angeles Unified School District announced last week that weekly COVID-19 tests would be phased out in favour of at-home tests. Weekly testing has also been discontinued in Wake County, North Carolina.
Others have shifted away from test-to-stay programmes, which became unmanageable during omicron variant surges last school year.
The American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teachers unions, expressed its appreciation for the guidance.
“Every educator and every parent starts every school year with great hope, and this year even more so,” President Randi Weingarten said. “After two years of uncertainty and disruption, we need as normal a year as possible so we can focus like a laser on what kids need.”
According to Joseph Allen, director of Harvard University’s healthy building programme, the new recommendations place a premium on keeping children in school as much as possible. Previous isolation policies, he said, forced millions of students to miss school, despite the virus posing a relatively low risk to children.
“Entire classrooms of kids had to miss school if they were deemed a close contact,” he said. “The closed schools and learning disruption have been devastating.”
Others say the CDC is going too far in relaxing its guidelines.
Allowing students to return to school five days after infection without proof of a negative COVID-19 test could lead to outbreaks in schools, according to Anne Sosin, a public health researcher at Dartmouth College. If a large number of teachers become ill, this could force entire schools to close temporarily, a situation that some schools faced last year.
“All of us want a stable school year, but wishful thinking is not the strategy for getting there,” she said. “If we want a return to normal in our schools, we have to invest in the conditions for that, not just drop everything haphazardly like we’re seeing across the country.”
This summer, the average number of reported COVID-19 cases and deaths has been relatively stable, at around 100,000 cases per day and 300 to 400 deaths.
The CDC previously stated that if people who are not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccinations come into close contact with someone who tests positive, they should stay home for at least five days. The agency now says that quarantining at home is not necessary, but that those affected should wear a high-quality mask for 10 days and be tested after five.
People who test positive should remain isolated from others for at least five days, according to the CDC, regardless of whether they were vaccinated.
According to the CDC, people can be released from isolation if they have been fever-free for 24 hours without the use of medication and are either symptom-free or improving.
The Food and Drug Administration also updated its recommendations for how many times people exposed to COVID-19 should test on Thursday.
Previously, the FDA recommended two rapid antigen tests spread out over two or three days to rule out infection. The agency now recommends three tests.
According to FDA officials, the change was made in response to new research that suggests the old protocol may miss too many infections, resulting in people spreading the coronavirus, especially if they do not develop symptoms.
