Date Published: 22/09/2020
ARCHIVED - Catalonia reducing quarantine period to ten days from next week
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Last week the Ministry of Health confirmed its intention to wait and see what decisions the rest of Europe took before making a decision about whether to follow the lead of France and reduce the quarantine period for covid positives downwards from the current 14 days.
The 14-day period which is currently the accepted norm for covid, was proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the first weeks of the epidemic, when very little was known about how the virus acted.
Since then, our knowledge has grown considerably, and in general, it is now accepted that a person can show symptoms or transmit the virus for up to two weeks, although by the last four days the virulence is only 7-10% of during the peak days of the infection. 90% of people will be positive for around 10 days after contracting the virus, although in around 2.5% of Covid cases, the first symptoms take more than two weeks to appear. In recent months, cases with incubation periods of up to 27 days have been reported.
In the end, France has reduced its quarantine period from 14 to 7 days, admitting publicly that a large percentage of those supposed to be maintaining a 14 day quarantine were failing to do so, simply because the period of confinement was viewed as being too long.
And this is the same situation as in Catalonia, admitted the Secretary of Public Health of the Generalitat, Josep Maria Argimon, in an interview with the Els Matins programme on TV3 on Tuesday morning.
He stated that the Generalitat has decided that in order to reduce the worrying number of people who do not comply with Covid isolation orders, that the Catalan Government will cut the quarantine period for close contacts of a positive coronavirus from the current 14 days to 10 days from next week.
The Catalan regional Government has carried out a round of consultations with epidemiological experts, among whom it has been impossible to find any unanimity.
Some of them had recommended reducing the days of isolation so that affected people who do not present symptoms could return to work and regain social normality as quickly as possible, others disagree with this measure, as Argimon himself has recognized.
Argimon argued that while the measure “causes risk; it is a controllable risk ”, while“ the benefit of an improvement in the isolation compliance increases ”, which is the reason why the measure is being adopted in the first place. According to Salut sources, only half of the negative and asymptomatic contacts actually complete their quarantine.
However, the Secretary of Public Health has indicated that "this measure will be evaluated" and "if it is necessary to go back, then we will go back."
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