Federal health officials are considering adding additional requirements involving testing to guidelines surrounding five-day quarantines.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering including a negative coronavirus test alongside their five-day quarantine period guidelines, which were updated last week.
“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested. The CDC is very well aware that there has been some pushback about that,” Fauci said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.”
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Fauci also noted the rise in reported cases, averaging around 400,000 a day. “We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” he said. “The acceleration of cases that we’ve seen is unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
This overwhelming surge has Fauci concerned about the omicron variant overwhelming healthcare providers and causing a “major disruption” in other essential services.
“When I say major disruption, you’re certainly going to see stresses on the system and the system being people with any kind of jobs … particularly with critical jobs to keep society functioning normally,” Fauci explained. “We already know that there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities that 10, 20, 25, and sometimes 30% of the people are ill. And that’s something that we need to be concerned about because we want to make sure that we don’t have such an impact on society that there really is a disruption. I hope that doesn’t happen.”
The CDC issued new guidelines on Tuesday, recommending a five-day isolation period if asymptomatic, followed by five days of masking around other people. These guidelines were the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated.
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The policy change led to criticism from former Trump staffers, pundits, and medical experts alike. Experts allege that the messaging fails to match the Biden administration’s promise to adhere to the relevant scientific evidence.
