The Centers for Disease Control significantly relaxed its COVID-19 guidance Friday, scrapping the five-day isolation period that’s been in place since late 2021. Now, the agency says people with COVID-19 can go back to regular activities once their symptoms are improving and they’ve been fever-free for 24 hours.
The change seems to signal that the government is done treating COVID-19 as a unique threat, even as it continues to kill more than three times as many Americans as the flu every week, according to CDC data.
Dr. Peter Katona, a public health professor at UCLA who used to work at the CDC, told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman that the change in guidance isn’t entirely because COVID-19 is less dangerous than before.
“Certainly the virus has gotten less potent than it was when the early stages of the outbreak occurred, so that’s one thing that’s happened,” he told KNX. “The other is that we've gone into a more practical mode where we weigh the social problems that being away from school, not going to work, we’re kind of weighing those as well as the economic issues.”
The new guidance for COVID-19 is in line with other respiratory viruses, like the flu and RSV, even though the CDC acknowledges that COVID-19 is more contagious than the flu, can cause more severe illness in some people, and can lead to additional long-term complications like blood clots and multisystem inflammatory syndrome.
Katona said public health officials are trying to lump COVID-19 together with other respiratory viruses because “they’re more alike than they’re different.”
“The problem with that, though, is that you have a highly immune population that's gonna get sicker, and that’s gonna be a potential problem over time,” he said. “And we also have the issue with long COVID that we don't really see with other kinds of respiratory viruses that may be more problematic than we think.”
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The moment of truth: if Katona got sick with COVID-19, would he feel comfortable going back to work and seeing patients a mere 24 hours after his fever breaks?
“No, but you know, you're talking about different degrees of problems,” he said. “If you're in a situation where you're dealing with people that are more likely to get very sick from being exposed, that's one thing, whether it's seeing patients or going to a physical therapy facility or something like that. But at the same time, if you're a normal person who has normal contacts that are very healthy, you may be in a different situation.”
A 2021 study found that about three-quarters of the American population have at least one condition that puts them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.
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