The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unveiled significant changes Thursday as part of a broad effort to overhaul the agency. COVID-19[feminine] guidance
“This guidance recognizes that the pandemic is not over, but it also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” CDC’s Greta Massetti said in a statement announcing the changes.
Among the biggest differences in the new recommendations: The CDC’s COVID-19 prevention guidance will no longer differentiate by whether people are up to date on their vaccinations.
Testing for COVID-19 will no longer be recommended in most places for people who do not have it covid symptoms.
And the CDC says that “to limit social and economic impacts, quarantine of exposed individuals is no longer recommended, regardless of vaccination status.”
Massetti told reporters Thursday that the recommendations are being revised to simplify the myriad of federal guidance on COVID-19 into an easier “framework.”
“It’s really about how people can understand how all these components fit together. It starts with people understanding their own personal risk, serious illness and that of their loved ones,” Massetti added.
Web pages released Thursday by the agency include new ones descriptions and illustrations “to help you assess how likely you are to have been infected when you are around someone with COVID-19” and a simplified guide to “what to do if you are exposed” to someone with COVID-19.
The agency also cut several specific COVID-19 recommendations schoolsincluding removing guidance on “cohort” and “test to stay” strategies where students exposed to the virus could remain in school as long as they continued to test negative.
“The key changes in school guidance are found in those sections that would parallel the changes in community guidance. So, for example, we no longer recommend quarantine. And therefore, in school guidance, there is no there is more quarantine section”, he added. Massetti told reporters.
Other tweaks to school guidance, which was last update in Maythey include clarifying that everyone should wear a mask in school nurse offices, the same as is already recommended for other healthcare settings, and removing a recommendation that classrooms be disinfected after a positive case is detected.
A summary of the guide was published on Thursday in the agency’s weekly morbidity and mortality report.
Detailed recommendations are expected to be updated and “streamlined” over the coming days, including for travel, nursing homes and other high-risk congregation settings.
Nursing and health care settings will continue to rely on the agency’s old community transmission framework, Massetti said, which is based on reported COVID-19 case counts.
The rest of the agency’s guidance will continue to be tied to the CDC’s community levels of COVID-19, which incorporate hospitalization numbers to determine whether counties are in “low,” “medium” or “high” levels of the illness
Massetti said the agency continues to reassess the performance of those metrics, but so far the agency has not “obtained any results that suggest a substantial change at this time.”
CDC COVID-19 officials have been telegraphing plans to significantly revise and simplify the guidelines for months, acknowledging growing fatigue with measures aimed at slowing the virus and the changing threat it poses more than two and a half years after the pandemic .
“We have high levels of vaccine-induced immunity and infection in the country, we have highly effective treatments and prevention tools, we have greatly reduced the risk of medically important illness, hospitalization and death,” said Dr Ian Williams, head of the agency’s response to COVID-19, said this week at a meeting of the agency’s outside advisers.
Williams said the CDC has also moved in recent months to reduce a substantial part of its stand-alone pandemic response, integrating its COVID-19 activities into the agency’s regular teams.
Change comes as the latest wave of COVID-19 It now appears to be tapering off, after hospitalization rates hit some of the worst levels since the Omicron spike in the winter.
figures published on Thursday The CDC shows that less than half of all Americans currently live in counties with “high” community levels of COVID-19, for the first time in a month.
Deaths remain around 400 a day on average, well below some of the worst peaks in previous waves, though still at a level that makes it one of the country’s leading causes of death.
“It’s about focusing our public health focus on sustainable efforts to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on health and society,” Williams added.
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