Editorial: Another important step toward normalizing COVID

From a practical perspective, the CDC’s new “streamlined” guidelines for COVID-19 don’t make much difference in South Carolina, where DHEC already had loosened its recommendations and schools were set to start back a lot closer to normal than anytime since 2019.

But the updated guidelines still mark an important step in our long journey toward moving from the COVID-19 disease that has killed more than 1 million Americans to the COVID-19 viral infection that we all have to live with, like the flu, pneumonia and the common cold.

The CDC estimates that nearly two and a half years into the pandemic, 95% of the U.S. population has been either vaccinated or infected (or both), which means they’re at lower risk of contracting the virus and at much lower risk of being hospitalized or dying. Combine that with more effective treatment options, and it means we can now treat COVID more like we treat other communicable diseases.

The CDC said the goal of the new guidelines was to focus on “sustainable measures to further reduce medically significant illness as well as to minimize strain on the health care system, while reducing barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.”

“This guidance 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,” said Greta Massetti, the lead author of the guidance published last Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

As the director of student health services at a Massachusetts college told NPR this week: “I don’t think we can just forget about COVID at all. But I do think we can kind of live with COVID for the first time and still do all of the other normal things. And that feels really different about this year than the past two.”

Some have argued that the changes validate the objections they’ve had for two years to the CDC’s earlier guidance, and government restrictions. They don’t. What they do is validate what public-health officials have told us from the beginning: that our knowledge of the disease will evolve, and the disease will evolve, and how we need to deal with it will evolve. It’s easy to forget that early on, what public health officials told us so often wasn’t that things we wanted to believe about the disease didn’t make sense, but that there was no evidence to support them. That should have been intuitive, because it takes time for evidence to develop about any new disease. Today, the evidence supports some early claims, and it exposes others as incorrect.

The Associated Press reports that the effect of the changes will be greatest on K-12 schools, because the new guidelines eliminate recommendations that schools in many states were still following for routine COVID testing. Unless there’s an outbreak, the guidelines no longer recommend that people quarantine after coming into close contact with someone with COVID, and they do away with test-to-stay requirements. Of course, DHEC already had eliminated those recommendations from its guidelines for S.C. schools, and most if not all districts had followed the state agency’s lead. But they still held cultural cache in some circles.

The new CDC guidelines tweak the number of days to isolate and wear masks if you get sick — and if you do get sick, you should consult the guidelines. But for most of us on most days, the biggest change will be what we’re supposed to do if we’re a “close contact” of someone who tests positive. The new guidelines say instead of quarantining, we need only to wear a high-quality mask and get tested five days after exposure, even if we’re not up to date on our vaccinations.

All this means we’re getting pretty close to where we should have been all along with all those other infectious diseases: Stay away from other people if you’re sick. Be particularly careful around people with weakened immune systems. And wash your hands a lot to reduce your risks of picking up viruses.

We’ve just added some new precautions that can help us reduce the chance that we’ll infect anybody else: Wear a mask and keep your distance if you must be around others while you’re sick, and for a few days afterwards, since you might still be infectious.

Or, to put it another way: Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you when they’re infectious.