New CDC guidelines say people with mild to moderate COVID-19 only need to isolate 10 days

New CDC guidelines say people who have had mild to moderate COVID-19 can come out of isolation after 10 days and do not need to be retested before going back to work. If patients had a fever, it needs to have been gone for at least 24 hours. The guidelines say symptoms are a better gauge of how infectious someone is so they are “not kept unnecessarily isolated and excluded from work or other responsibilities.” People with severe COVID-19, many of whom are hospitalized, could be infectious for as long as 20 days, though most of them are not. The majority of those with severe disease, more than 88%, were no longer infectious after 10 days. CDC said 95% were no longer infectious after 20 days. “We didn’t have this kind of data in the early days of the pandemic. Now they’re really moving towards science-driven recommendations as we apply the data that are coming in,” said Roger Shapiro, MD, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.