The Outbreak Management Team (OMT) has advised the cabinet to reduce the current 14 day quarantine requirement to ten days in light of new research. The cabinet’s decision on this will be announced at tonight’s press conference.
The 14 day quarantine requirement was designed around the fact that coronavirus incubates for a period of 12 days. A further two days were added to be certain of preventing new infections. However, the OMT believes this length of time is unnecessarily long, reports NOS.
New insights
Studies have shown that 99% of people who catch COVID-19 show signs of illness within 10 days of infection, sometimes even within seven days. New scientific literature and data from source and contact research of the GGDs show that half of coronavirus patients have incubation periods of less than five days.
Knowing this, the OMT are confident that few cases will be missed if quarantine requirements are shortened to 10 days, calculated from the moment of possible infection.
A tricky decision
Regardless, the maximum incubation time of coronavirus is 12 days. Should the quarantine requirements be reduced as the OMT suggests, it would no longer match this and cases could potentially slip through the nets.
But OMT argues that shortening the time-frame by more than a quarter is a more practical quarantine strategy. It would decrease the social and economic impact of quarantining without risking too many cases being missed.
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