SAO PAULO, SP (FOLHAPRESS) – England has announced that it will reduce the minimum quarantine time for people with COVID-19 to five days, similar to measures recently taken by the US and Brazil. As of this Monday (17), anyone who has the disease will be able to leave the isolation if they present two consecutive negative results – one at the beginning of the fifth day and the other at the beginning of the sixth.
Until now, the recommended duration was up to ten days, which is likely to be reduced to seven if you have a negative test.
Boris Johnson’s government is pushing to reduce the isolation period to five days, as already done by the United States, due to the massive absence of infected professionals working in key sectors such as health, education and transportation. has gone.
British Health Minister Sajid Javid told parliament this Thursday (13) that the reduction in quarantine would be done to “minimize” the impact of absenteeism from work on the economy.
Citing figures from the British health protection agency UKHSA, Javid argued that “around two thirds of positive cases at the end of the fifth day are no longer transmitted”.
“We have reviewed the isolation period for positive cases, to ensure that established measures maximize economic and educational activity and also minimize the risk that infectious people leave quarantine”, he told deputies declare.
At the end of December 2021, the US reduced the isolation time to five days, with the condition of wearing a “tight-fitting mask” for ten days, in addition to requiring full vaccination.
On January 10, it was Brazil’s health ministry’s turn to recommend similarly shorter isolation times for asymptomatic people, despite warnings from experts that there is not enough evidence that the new rule is safe – especially of access to testing. with difficulty. Country parents.
With more than 151,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, the United Kingdom has recorded a record daily infections attributable to the Omicron version in recent weeks, the seventh-highest number in the world.
However, due to booster vaccination and the lower severity of the variant, hospitalizations and deaths did not increase as rapidly.
The health minister said, “It is encouraging that during this wave we have not seen an increase in intensive care patients with COVID-19. And there are already signs that the hospitalization rate is starting to decline. “
