It's time to reduce the Centers for Disease Control's quarantine guidelines for fully vaccinated people who have a breakthrough COVID-19 infection, Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Newsmax Monday.
"I think 10 days for fully vaccinated people who have a breakthrough infection is just too long," Jha told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It's unnecessary. What I think we should be doing is five days, followed by a rapid test. What you'll find is most people are negative on the rapid tests after five days, and that means they're not contagious, and they should be able to get back to work or get back to their families and just get back to their lives."
Jha also said that while the current omicron surge is a challenge, matters are different this holiday season than they were last, and "we now have the tools to be able to get back to our lives in a much more reasonable way."
But still, "we can't ignore [COVID] and act like it's completely gone, but we have to manage it very differently than we did a year ago."
Meanwhile, the omicron variant is more quickly diagnosed and carries an incubation period of just three days after a person is exposed to it.
"So the first day or two, you're probably fine," he said. "You're not going ot be contagious. But the whole question of how long do we ask people to be isolated or quarantined after exposure does need to be looked at much more carefully. I think it needs to be shortened probably for everybody, but particularly for vaccinated people who we know to clear the virus much more quickly."
Jha further addressed the current test shortages, as demand is growing in the nation's major cities as the omicron variant spreads.
"I just think testing has not been prioritized," he said. "It wasn't initially in the first year of the pandemic, and even this year. I would have thought that the Biden administration would have done a much better job of getting testing out there."
However, neither rapid tests nor standard testing has been prioritized, as the government has relied more on getting people vaccinated first, said Jha.
"I think they relied pretty heavily on vaccines and that alone would end this pandemic," he said. "But we still need testing."
Jha also discussed the latest antivirals that have been approved and said that the medications should not be widely distributed in the same way that President Joe Biden plans to surge home tests.
He noted that to get the pills, a person must first test positive for the virus, so testing capability is needed.
There is also a limited supply of the antivirals, said Jha, so "we want to make sure we're giving it to people who actually have COVID and not a cold."
Also, many people who are showing symptoms such as congestion and coughing aren't infected with COVID, but may instead have the flu or a cold, and "you don't want to be giving out this drug to people [if] it is something else," said Jha. "It's not going to work, and we want to reserve it for people who have COVID."
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