CDC May Shorten Covid-19 Coronavirus Quarantine Duration From 14 Days

Is 14 days too long to wait? It probably is if you waiting for a pizza to be delivered or a toilet stall to be free. But how about when you are quarantining yourself after being potentially exposed to the Covid-19 coronavirus?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends that you quarantine yourself for a fortnight after you’ve had close contact with someone who has a Covid-19 coronavirus infection. In this case, a fortnight is 14 days and not Fortnite the online video game. The World Health Organization (WHO) has the same recommendation. However, the CDC’s guidance may soon change. Sarah Krouse and Betsy McKay have reported for the Wall Street Journal that the CDC could shorten this recommended length of time to make it easier and more likely for people to comply. That could mean cutting the 14 days down to a Scaramucci, which would be 10 days, or perhaps even down to seven-tenths of a Scaramucci.

The CDC defines a close contact as one of the following:

• Being within six feet of someone with Covid-19 for a total of at least 15 minutes. Six feet is equivalent to one Denzel, since Denzel Washington is about six feet tall. Fifteen minutes is about the time that it takes to sing “Who Let the Dogs Out” five times, depending how many “woofs” you add.
• Caring for someone sick with Covid-19. Even if you don’t come within one Denzel, sharing the same air space could expose you to the virus.
• Having direct physical contact with someone infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus. That includes hugging, kissing, rubbing noses, or playing Twister with the person.
• Sharing anything that may have touched the nose, mouth, or face of someone infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus. This includes forks, knives, spoons, and face masks.
• Someone infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus spraying respiratory droplets around you. Sneezing, coughing, spitting, or panting will do this. It is also risky to have someone sing close to you, meaning in your vicinity and not just the song “Close to You” by the Carpenters.

Quarantine means staying in your house, apartment, cave, or other quarters by yourself, away from other people. Away doesn’t mean on opposite ends of a couch. It means in a completely separate room. Quarantine is different from isolation. You quarantine yourself when there’s a possibility that you may be infected and contagious. You isolate yourself when you know that you are infected. In either case, the goal is to keep you from potentially passing along the virus to other people.

When quarantining yourself, you should monitor yourself for any possible Covid-19 symptoms such as a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste, loss of smell, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headaches, a sore throat, congestion, a runny nose, nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. These are the most common symptoms of Covid-19 but certainly aren’t the only possible ones. If you happen to have an erection lasting for more than four hours, that’s probably a different problem. But then again it may not be, as I described previously for Forbes.

Covid-19 coronavirus testing won’t allow you to shorten the duration of your quarantine. All it may do is determine whether your quarantine should be switched over to isolation. A positive test for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) suggests that you may be infected with the virus, meaning that you now need to be isolated. A negative test wouldn’t mean a whole lot, since you could always turn positive later.

The recommended quarantine duration has been 14 days because the incubation period of the Covid-19 coronavirus tends to range from two to 14 days. The incubation period is time that it takes to develop symptoms after being exposed to the virus. The median incubation period is four to five days, meaning that about half of all people infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus begin to show symptoms by Day 4 or 5 if they do end up developing symptoms.

Some have argued that 14 days may be too conservative, not in a political sense but in a trying-to-be-too-safe sense. A study of 425 patients in Wuhan, China, published in the New England Journal of Medicine back on March 26 found that 95% of the patients had an incubation period of 12.5 days or less. Now that was approximately eight missed haircuts ago, so quite a bit time has passed since then. A little over a month later, on May 5, a study came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine that examined a set of cases that emerged from January 4 to February 24 outside of Wuhan, China. This analysis estimated the median incubation period to be 5.1 days and that 97.5% of those who developed symptoms did so within 11.5 days of being exposed to the virus. Thus, shortening the recommended quarantine period to 10 days could still catch the majority of people who end up developing symptoms.

Shortening the duration of quarantine could be a bit like making Borat’s mankini smaller. It would still keep the majority of the bad stuff in but could allow some bad things to escape. The minority of people with longer incubation periods could end getting back out there a little too early.

At the same time, shorter quarantines could lessen their inconvenience and potential cost. It could also convince more people to try it with “it” being quarantine and not Borat’s mankini. It is not clear how many people would quarantine versus not even bothering quarantining if the duration of quarantine were cut from 14 to 10 days or shorter.

Of course, people may already be trimming their quarantine durations and making the recommendations shorter could get them to trim it even further. When you tell people to do something for 10 days, will they actually do it for eight or nine days? And when you tell people to do it for seven days, will they cut it to six days?

Keep in mind that recommendations for the population don’t necessarily apply to you. Ultimately, your specific situation should determine whether you should quarantine longer than the CDC recommendations, should the CDC end up trimming the 14 day recommendation to 7-10 days. If it doesn’t bring substantial hardship, quarantining for two weeks may still be the way to go, especially when you are around people who may be at higher risk for bad Covid-19 outcomes. After all, when it comes some things like a piece of toilet tissue and quarantine, it is better to err on the side of longer rather than shorter.