Why The CDC May Shorten The Quarantine Period For COVID-19

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to shorten the number of required quarantine days amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The CDC currently recommends 14 days of isolation if someone has come in contact with the virus. However, the new recommendation could lower that number to 7 to 10 days of quarantine, NPR reports.

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, believes the revision, which cuts down the number of days of isolation, would be followed by more people.

“Shortening quarantine recommendations to focus on the period of time during which the vast majority of people who are exposed to the virus are likely to become contagious is a smart, pragmatic move that is likely to boost compliance,” she explained.

“Right now, contact tracing efforts in the U.S. are severely hindered by deep disincentives for contacts of cases to quarantine.”

Nuzzo added, “A seven or ten day quarantine recommendation may be easier for people to bear and hopefully may help get more contacts of cases to comply.”

On Tuesday, Brett Giroir, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said health officials are considering making changes to the two-week quarantine recommendation.

Giroir stated that “a preponderance of evidence that a shorter quarantine complemented by a test might be able to shorten that quarantine period.”

Henry Walke, the CDC's incident manager for COVID-19 response, told the Wall Street Journal that studies have found effective quarantines in less than two weeks.

Although the new recommendation would require a negative COVID-19 test before an exposed person could leave quarantine sooner than two weeks, there is a chance some infections may be missed.