The isolation period for Covid-19 patients with symptoms should be reduced from 10 days to seven, the ministerial advisory committee has recommended.
Covid-19 isolation should be reduced to seven days, the ministerial advisory committee has recommended. Stock photo.The isolation period for Covid-19 patients with symptoms should be reduced from 10 days to seven, the ministerial advisory committee has recommended.
Because testing identifies only a small minority of Covid-19 cases, “isolation serves little overall public health purpose”, it said. “Testing prior to return to work is not feasible, as tests may remain positive for much longer than the period in which the patient is infectious,” it said. The proportion of people with some immunity to Covid-19 has risen substantially, exceeding 60-80% in several serosurveys.The committee recommended that isolation rules should apply equally to vaccinated and unvaccinated people, and to high-risk and low-risk individuals.
“We have learned more about the manner in which Covid-19 is spread , and also now have to contend with variants of concern whose epidemiology differs from that of the ancestral strains of SARS-CoV-2. “Unfortunately, there is good evidence that the rate of case ascertainment in SA is low. Testing is heavily biased towards symptomatic cases, but only a small percentage of cases are symptomatic.
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