A few days ago, the CDC released new "streamlined" COVID-19 guidance "to help the public better protect themselves and understand their risk." According to the author of the new guidance, it "acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives."
The new guidelines deemphasize prevention of transmission and emphasize prevention of severe disease. Greta Massetti, a C.D.C. epidemiologist, said at a news briefing on Thursday:
We know that Covid-19 is here to stay. High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection, and the many tools that we have available to protect people from severe illness and death, have put us in a different place.
What's in the new guidelines? Here's an abbreviated list:
- Be up to date on vaccinations
- Do the same thing if your exposed whether you're vaccinated or not, namely wear a good mask for 10 days and get tested after 5 days
- If you're infected isolate at home for five days, 10 days if you have serious illness, also do previous bullet
- No longer get screened unless you've been exposed
- Don't worry too much about physical distancing
They also issued new
school guidance that removes recommendations for diagnostic testing and quarantine after exposure (except high-risk settings, which schools are not). Otherwise the recommendations are the same as above.
"Streamline" is an interesting choice of words in the revised guidance. In this context it means "to change something so it works better." Is this an acknowledgement that the old guidelines didn't work very well, per critics' complaints?
Writing an op-ed in the New York Times, Ross Douthat accuses the CDC of "leading from behind":
In reality, the C.D.C. has been consistently behind — behind evolving scientific knowledge, behind the curve of Covid’s evolution, behind how most Americans have already adapted. As my colleague Emily Anthes put it, gently, the new guidelines “effectively acknowledge the way many Americans have been navigating the pandemic for some time.”
I find it hard to disagree with this. For example, and as Douthat points out, we've known for quite some time that the virus is mainly spread by aerosols, not "fomites" (large droplets expelled by someone infected and inhaled at close range or picked up from surfaces).
The CDC
finally admitted this in May of last year (something else they were behind on). But only now have they deemphasized their out-of-date recommendations on social distancing.
His colleague is on-the-nose with the observation that CDC has now merely made official the way most of us have been dealing with the virus for the last year.
On the other hand, Douthat is kind of a smarty-pants. He's right that they could have been more proactive. But doesn't acknowledge the forces working against this: Legions of smarty-pants commentators, conspiracy theorists, and anti-whatever nutjobs standing by to jump on their every move.
In this environment, it's understandable that they would be conservative about making or changing guidance. Anyway, the New Normal is officially here, folks.
