CDC loosens COVID-19 guidance, regardless of vaccination status

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has revealed some crucial changes on Thursday to their COVID-19 guidance.

“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” Greta Massetti, the chief of the CDC’s Field Epidemiology and Prevention Branch, said in a statement confirming the changes.

The CDC still states on their website the importance of slowing the spread of COVID-19, however they are shifting their strategy to place the onus on the individual, as opposed to issuing mask mandates to businesses and schools.

The CDC have also said that “to limit social and economic impacts, quarantine of exposed persons is no longer recommended, regardless of vaccination status.” 

One CDC webpage, titled “How to Protect Yourself and Others,” has been heavily modified. It no longer states, “If possible, maintain 6 feet between the person who is sick and other household members.”

It goes onto detail what you should do in the event that you have to be in close proximity to someone who has tested positive. “In those situations, use as many prevention strategies as you can, such as practicing hand hygiene, consistently and correctly wearing a high-quality mask, improving ventilation, and keeping your distance, when possible, from the person who is sick or who tested positive.”

Massetti spoke to reporters and said that COVID-19 guidance was being moved into a simpler “framework.”

“It’s really about kind of how people can understand how all of these components fit together. It starts with people understanding their own personal risk, for serious illness, and that of their loved ones,” Massetti added.

The CDC have added descriptions and illustrations “to help you assess the likelihood that you were infected when you were around a person with COVID-19” and a simplified guide to “what to do if you were exposed” to someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Massetti has also confirmed the new guidelines for schools which will allow students who have been exposed to COVID-19 through close contacts to stay in school, provided that they continue to test negative.

“The key changes in the school guidance are in those sections that would parallel the changes in the community guidance. So, for example, we are no longer recommending quarantine. And so in the school guidance, there is no more section on quarantine,” Massetti told the press.