--- title: The CDC Dropped Its COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines. Experts Are Split description: Experts disagree about what the change means for public health. canonical: https://time.com/6695102/covid-19-isolation-guidelines-experts/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-02-15T15:41:03.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-01-19T12:11:27.000Z article:section: Health og:title: The CDC Dropped Its COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines. Experts Are Split og:description: Experts disagree about what the change means for public health. og:url: https://time.com/6695102/covid-19-isolation-guidelines-experts/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0f46cf6f42f06056/698a4898096a945ec16af0be/covid-isolation.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: A woman wears a mask in a subway station. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The CDC Dropped Its COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines. Experts Are Split twitter:description: Experts disagree about what the change means for public health. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0f46cf6f42f06056/698a4898096a945ec16af0be/covid-isolation.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The CDC Dropped Its COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines. Experts Are Split > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: U.S. House Coronavirus Panel Looks to 'Restore Trust' in the American Public for Vaccines [Watch (HLS stream): U.S. House Coronavirus Panel Looks to 'Restore Trust' in the American Public for Vaccines](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/67oaTizi.m3u8) (3:21)  _Published 2024-02-15. Lawmakers voiced concern on Capitol Hill Thursday about the need to "restore" trust in the public for vaccines, which include measles, influenza, and COVID-19._  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Updated: Jan 19, 2026 12:11 PM UTCPublished: Feb 15, 2024 3:41 PM UTC  A woman wearing a face mask walks through a NJ Transit turnstile at a subway station in New York City on Jan. 11, 2024. A woman wearing a face mask walks through a NJ Transit turnstile at a subway station in New York City on Jan. 11, 2024. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Updated: Jan 19, 2026 12:11 PM UTCPublished: Feb 15, 2024 3:41 PM UTC On March 1, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dropped its long-standing recommendation that people with COVID-19 [should isolate themselves](https://time.com/6322665/covid-19-isolation-policy-2023/) for at least five days to avoid spreading the disease. Instead of the five-day rule, the CDC now recommends that people stay home until they've been fever-free for at least 24 hours without medication and their symptoms are generally improving. Once they’re feeling better, they can resume normal life—though the agency recommends taking extra precautions for five days after leaving home, including limiting close contact with others, moving activities outside, and wearing a mask around others. If someone’s symptoms worsen or their fever returns, they should revert to staying home. That shift, which echoes [similar moves in California and Oregon](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/health/covid-isolation-guidance-california-oregon-break-from-cdc/index.html), streamlines the CDC’s recommendations for COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses. The agency’s [website now lists](https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/prevention/precautions-when-sick.html) the same advice for people sick with respiratory illnesses including COVID-19, the flu, and RSV, and its page on COVID-19-specific isolation has been archived. Even before the shift in guidance became official, experts predicted that 2024 would bring a further relaxation of COVID-19 policy. “The guidance becomes lighter and lighter over time, and that actually makes sense as people build up more immunity,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and the Biden Administration’s former COVID-19 response coordinator, said in a January interview with TIME. **Read More**: [_We’re In a Major COVID-19 Surge. It’s Our New Normal_](https://time.com/6554340/covid-19-surge-2024/) The virus itself has not evolved to become less contagious. But people’s tolerance for public-health precautions has plummeted. Many people in the U.S. haven’t paid attention to COVID-19 guidance in a long time, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “You have to face reality,” he says. Meeting people where they are may encourage them to take at least some precautions, he says. Some people who are unwilling or unable to isolate for five full days might be open to staying home for a shorter period of time when they’re acutely ill, for example. ### More from TIME Not all experts are as optimistic. Lucky Tran, a science communicator at Columbia University, called the end of five-day isolation periods “a reckless anti-public-health policy that goes against science, encourages disease spread, and puts everyone at risk. The bare minimum we should have learned from this devastating pandemic that has killed and disabled millions is that [we should stay home when sick](https://time.com/6279542/pandemic-new-normal-disease/).” Loosening isolation recommendations “ignores the continued suffering” of people who are immunocompromised, chronically ill, disabled, or otherwise at heightened risk of severe COVID-19, Tran adds. Eleanor Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health, says it's “really strange” for the CDC to relax its guidance, given that even a five-day isolation period isn’t always long enough to stop the spread. [Studies have shown](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797070) that a significant portion of people who catch COVID-19 test positive, and [thus potentially remain contagious](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600%2822%2900226-0/fulltext), for longer than five days. The absence of symptoms also isn’t a guarantee that someone is no longer infectious, Murray says. Research has long suggested that pre-symptomatic or [asymptomatic people can spread the virus](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774707), although they [may not be as contagious as people who are sicker](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02642-4). At-home tests aren’t a perfect measure either, although they can [provide some information about potential contagiousness](https://time.com/6246838/confusing-rapid-covid-19-test-results/). Even still, Dr. Tara Bouton, an assistant professor at the Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine who has [researched COVID-19 isolation periods](https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/76/3/e227/6614634?login=false#367544187), feels it's reasonable to loosen isolation guidance at this stage of the pandemic, when fewer people who get infected die or become hospitalized. That's in large part because lengthy isolation periods disproportionately penalize people whose income depends on working in person, Bouton says. “The ability to isolate is a privilege,” Bouton says, and public-health policy needs to balance the costs and benefits of asking people to do it. Murray, however, fears that relaxing isolation guidance will make it easier for [businesses to deny their employees time off to recover](https://time.com/6217476/paid-sick-leave-changes-since-pandemic/). Ending the five-day guidance equates to “providing information that is not evidence-based and is not going to help people make informed decisions, but will probably be used to limit paid leave,” Murray says. So what would the experts do now if they got sick with COVID-19? Even though Bouton feels that a blanket five-day isolation recommendation is no longer necessary, she says she would stay home around that long because she’s able to—and because working as an infectious-disease doctor puts her in contact with lots of immunocompromised patients, who remain at increased risk of severe disease if they get infected. Murray says she would stay home until her symptoms cleared up and wait until she’d gotten two consecutive negative test results, spaced out by at least a day, before exiting isolation. (Often, that approach requires more than five days of isolation, since people can test positive on at-home rapid tests for more than a week.) Tran says he’d go even further: he’d stay home for 10 days, self-test multiple times before ending isolation, and wear a mask—as he usually does anyway—upon returning to public spaces. Osterholm, too, says he’d stay home for five days and continue to wear an N95 in the immediate aftermath of his illness. Efforts like those are important, he says—but they’re also not everything. He’d like the public-health community to devote more attention to encouraging vaccination among vulnerable older adults, [many of whom have not gotten the latest shot](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage/covidvaxview/interactive/vaccination-dashboard.html), and streamlining Paxlovid access for high-risk patients. Those efforts, Osterholm says, could save lives at a time when [most COVID-19 deaths occur among people who are elderly](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/older-adults-made-90-us-covid-deaths-2023) or otherwise at high risk—and at a time when Americans are moving on from COVID-19\. ## Transcript Sometimes we don't know any weaknesses in the system until it is truly tested now is the time to safeguard for the future. And about how we can do better next time. If there's things we recognize that could have been done better. It's now a time to look at the things we did. Well as well. But we need to restore trust in public health. In the process. I'm very concerned with the hesitancy by so many today to vaccinate their children. That's a great concern of mine Bears has been the source of attention and controversy since the beginning of the covid-19 vaccine roll out. However concerns about these data are usually met with dismissive replies and fortunately they often point to the fact that bears is unable to prove causality. Today's hearing does have the potential to generate forward-looking policy solutions that improve people's lives. However, it only does so if we approach this topic with care because if we don't I worry that we are opening a Pandora's Box that I fear we won't be able to close again right now. We are already witnessing an alarming rise in overall vaccine hesitancy, which has been fueled by Miss and disinformation spread online during the last four years. I worry that the politicization of medicine the politicization of Science and vaccines will ultimately hurt us all in the end. And that the manufacturing of distrust and public-health norms and institutions that we have held true for so long will make us last prepare to combat a future pandemic vaccines work. We know from clear and compelling evidence that vaccines save the lives of millions of children and adults every year by producing immune responses that prevent diseases such as measles influenza and covid-19. Do they may not provide Perfect protection vaccines can often prevent the most serious consequences of disease, including hospitalization and death. The American public can rest assured that vaccines that are authorized or proved are safe and effective vaccine safety monitoring by CDC and our partners is rigorous and transparent the data continues to show that staying up-to-date on covid-19 vaccine is an effective and safe way to prevent severe illness hospitalizations and deaths the development and administration covid-19 vaccine is a remarkable scientific achievement after the most robust and comprehensive safety monitoring in our history. The science shows that we should all have confidence that covid-19 vaccines are both safe and effective when you say safe and effective that's relative in your mind. It's relative in your mind, but it's not to the person at home. They hear one hundred percent safe and one hundred percent effective. That's what they hear. This is why words matter, dr. Fauci and his testimony even said you can never say that any treatment is 100% safe. Yet in essence. 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