CDC New Covid-19 Quarantine Guidelines Viewed As ‘Giving Up’ On Pandemic

The more transmissible BA.5 Omicron subvariant is still spreading. The U.S. has been having an average of 42,816 Covid-19-related hospitalizations and 490 Covid-19-related deaths a day, according to the New York Times, and who knows how many new cases of long Covid a day. Oh, and there have been more and more reports of Paxlovid rebound occuring where people have turned Covid-19 positive after testing negative, as I recently covered for Forbes. So, with all this happening, what should the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) do? Strengthen Covid-19 precautions? Re-emphasize existing precautions at least? Ummm, how about further relaxing recommended Covid-19 precautions? Is that your final answer? Wouldn’t you like to phone a friend?

Well, the last of these options is basically what the CDC did on Thursday when they issued updated guidelines. And with that came an increase in the number of times phrases like “CDC giving up”, “CDC gives up”, and “CDC raises white flag” have been used on Twitter and other social media.

Yeah, “give up” are not the type of words that you want associated with the organization primarily responsible for protecting the health of Americans, unless you were saying something like “give it up for the CDC.” And many people weren’t exactly saying “give it up for the CDC” on Twitter over the past two days. Rather, they were surprised that the CDC now recommends that most Americans no longer need to quarantine after exposure to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), even if they are unvaccinated. Instead, going forward, people who have been exposed only have to wear a face mask for 10 days and get tested for Covid-19 after five days, as Joe Walsh reported for Forbes. That’s not too comforting given that many people have been ditching face masks as if they were soiled underwear ever since most locations lifted their face mask requirements. So now your chances of running into someone infected with the SARS-CoV-2 at work, at school, on an airplane, in a restaurant, in a concert, or at a store just went up even higher.

Plus, these new CDC guidelines no longer recommend that most institutions like schools routinely test for Covid-19. So coupled with the lack of face mask, vaccination, or improve-ventilation-and-air-filtration requirements, is this a roundabout way of saying to most schools, workplaces, airlines, and businesses, in general, “yeah, you don’t really need to do anything?”

On Twitter, guitarist Charles Johnson called what the CDC had just issued as the “Hey, whatever” guidance:

Would this be sort of the direct opposite of the “Never give up, never surrender” quote from Commander Peter Quincy Taggart in the movie Galaxy Quest? “Sort of give up, kind of surrender” wouldn’t have quite the same ring. But…