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With daily new cases hovering around the 60,000 mark and the threat of spreading variants, navigating the pandemic is admittedly tricky, even for those fully vaccinated. The CDC director clarified that these guidelines will not be the last word.
“Our understanding of the virus continues to evolve rapidly. The recommendations issued today are only a first step,” CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said on Monday at a press conference on the Covid- 19 at the White House.
Andy Slavitt, the Biden administration’s senior Covid-19 adviser, told CNN that more people get their full vaccinations – currently around 10% of the population have them – the more the CDC will add to his advice.
“The rate at which new directions will develop is directly related to how quickly we will vaccinate the country. This is the key point. At 10% of vaccinations, we have these directions. At 20-30%, we will have new ones. directions, “Slavitt told CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Slavitt said there will be a separate change in how the CDC gives advice next time around. It will move away from the binary messaging type of this first set.
For example, the guidelines currently advise all people, including fully vaccinated people, to avoid medium and large crowds. Fully vaccinated people, however, advise the guidelines, can now swap the outdoor picnic table for the dining room table and meet inside and unmasked.
The next version of the guidelines, Slavitt said, will instead describe activities as being more in a low, medium or high risk category.
Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu, infectious disease specialist at Yale, thinks that with a sliding risk scale, the CDC could be “a little wider” next time around, for example, by addressing more specific places such as gyms and restaurants.
But for now, many questions remain unanswered.
More travel questions
In a statement to CNN on Tuesday, CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said the agency “may update its travel recommendations for fully vaccinated people as more people are vaccinated and we’re learning more about how vaccines work in the real world. It’s something we’ll be watching closely in the United States. ”
McDonald added that “several new virus variants have spread around the world and the United States through travel. Due to the increased risk for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people, everyone, regardless of vaccination status, should still take all CDC-recommended precautions before, during, and after travel. “
Walensky of the CDC explained on Monday that “Every time there is an increase in travel, we have an increase in cases in this country. We are really trying to restrict travel to this current period, and hopefully our next round of guidelines have more science on what vaccinated people can do. “
Some public health experts are also pushing back.
Former Baltimore health commissioner Dr Leana Wen told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin that the latest advice was too conservative and inconsistent with other recommendations on who were vaccinated Americans might see. She hopes for more in the next round.
“In fact, I would take it a step further and say that people who are fully vaccinated should be able to travel – should be encouraged to travel, and that’s one of those incentives that we can offer to restore freedoms, that you. are now able to travel and visit loved ones and go to museums and cultural institutions once you are fully immunized, ”Wen said.
It would help if the next guidelines offered a range of risks for who would have to travel, he said.
For example, if the mother of someone 65 or older is vaccinated but has 15 underlying conditions, Rutherford said, she might want to think twice before getting on a plane. “I mean, the effectiveness of the vaccine is an average, and there’s a certain failure rate and you might not want to take that risk,” Rutherford said.
If, however, the older mother is healthy and has an adult child who is obese and has high blood pressure – two conditions that make a person more vulnerable to the severe effects of Covid-19 – the mother may want to reserve her child. ticket.
“It’s a highly individualized circumstance,” Rutherford said.
Adapt to more scenarios
The guidelines also did not address fully immunized people in schools. President Joe Biden announced last week that he would order states to make teacher immunizations a priority and many states have done so.
As more teachers are fully vaccinated, Rutherford said, the guidelines might want to relate, for example, to school districts that regularly test people for Covid-19. They may no longer need to screen these teachers.
Future guidelines will also want to look at college campuses that conduct regular screening.
“Is it good enough to be vaccinated, and are they going to have to have a reduced density in the dorms?” Rutherford asks. “I can imagine colleges looking at vaccination as a way to get people back on track and they will want advice.”
Even as more guidelines come out of the CDC, Ogbuagu reminds people that it’s not just your immunization status that you need to keep in mind as you figure out what activities can be added to your life.
“Remember that if you are in an area of high intensity or transmission, you have to adapt to it,” Ogbuagu said. “These guidelines should have appropriate variability to relax some of these measures depending on the incidence of Covid-19.”
Ogbuagu empathizes with the CDC guideline writers and is confident that they will give good advice in the next round, balancing what they know about science with each.
“There’s a little message in there that I think the CDC must have taken into account with their guidelines. A lot of us think the guidelines could have gone further, but I’m pretty sympathetic, because we’re at. a very difficult middle position in the pandemic, “Ogbuagu said.” It may be a bit premature to make such broad recommendations, but that will change as more and more people receive these highly effective vaccines. “
CNN’s Dr Sanjay Gupta and Ross Levitt contributed to this report
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