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People who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 do not need to quarantine if exposed to the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday in updated guidelines on its website.
Quarantine is generally recommended for healthy people who have been exposed to the virus. During quarantine, people are asked to isolate themselves from others for one to two weeks to see if they develop symptoms of Covid-19. By not exposing others, quarantine can help stop the spread of the disease.
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In the updated guidelines, the CDC said such a quarantine is not necessary for people who are fully vaccinated within three months of receiving their last doses, as long as they do not develop any symptoms. “Fully vaccinated” means at least two weeks have passed since a person received the second dose of a two-dose vaccine or a dose of a single-dose vaccine.
Other recommendations remain in place for fully vaccinated people. They include wearing masks, social distancing, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces.
The guidelines say the risk that fully vaccinated people could spread the coronavirus to others is “still uncertain.” However, “vaccination has been shown to prevent symptomatic Covid-19; symptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission is believed to play a more important role in transmission than purely asymptomatic transmission,” according to the CDC.
The CDC is already recommending that people who have had Covid-19 and have recovered should not need to quarantine for 90 days after illness, if they are newly exposed to an infected person; the new guide for people vaccinated is in line with previous recommendations.
A spokesperson for the CDC declined to comment on the updated guidance.
The advice “makes sense,” said Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, though he was curious. . on the evidence the CDC was using.
Initial data from AstraZeneca and Moderna’s Phase 3 clinical trials have suggested that the vaccines may slow the transmission of the virus, although more work is needed to confirm the results.
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Saskia Popescu, epidemiologist and infection prevention specialist at George Mason University in Virginia, said the new guideline “reiterates that there is confidence in protection for 90 days after vaccination, which is similar to robust immunity after infection “.
The directions “are likely to evolve as we gain a better understanding of vaccine-derived immunity,” especially for those outside the three-month post-vaccination period, Popescu said.
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