'Choose To Protect, Not Infect' With Coronavirus, Dr. Ezike Urges

CHICAGO — Public health officials hope more people will follow new coronavirus quarantine guidelines that allow for someone exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19 to end their quarantine four days sooner.

Those with a negative test result would be cleared to end quarantine in half the time as the original recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control — as long as they remain asymptomatic.

As new infections contracted during last week's Thanksgiving holiday begin to be added to Illinois' roughly 10,000 new cases a day, Illinois Public Health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said the shortened self-quarantine guidance would be effective for more than 90 percent of people.

The previous federal government guidance for a 14-day quarantine was aimed at preventing infections from someone who only becomes contagious after more than a week.

"However, in further study and extensive modeling by CDC and other academic institutions, the CDC has now reduced that to 10 days, as long as the individual does not have any symptoms at all. This does not mean that the person can't develop symptoms on day 12 or 13, but we know from looking at all the data that the risk of that happening is between 1 and 10 percent," Ezike explained.

Ezike said people with no symptoms who receive a negative coronavirus test result may end their quarantine after seven days.

"So if you are a close contact of someone with COVID and on day five you get tested and that test comes back negative on day seven or day eight, you can end your quarantine at that time," she said. "You still have to quarantine between the time you took the test and when you get that negative result."

Despite the risk of some people developing symptoms and becoming contagious after the 10-day period, public health officials figure more people will follow, rather than flout, shorter self-quarantine recommendations, and fewer will spread the virus to others after being exposed.

"The hope is by reducing the amount of time in quarantine it will be easier for people to take this critical action without the additional economic hardship of not being able to work for so long," Ezike said Thursday at Gov. J.B. Pritzker's daily news conference. "Better adherence to these quarantine guidances can help reduce stress on communities by decreasing the number of new infections."

The IDPH director said decisions by individuals about whether or not to avoid gatherings and wear masks would be key to the future trajectory of the virus.

"I would like to remind people that our path forward starts today with what we choose to do in our actions for today. I want to thank everyone who is making the sacrifices, who is wearing their masks, who is foregoing group activities," she said. "With continued actions like yours and others following your lead, we can turn this around. Let's choose to protect and not infect those around us by avoiding the gathering and wearing a mask and washing our hands."

Pritzker said he could not understand why people would neglect to follow public health guidance, with record-setting numbers of coronavirus deaths this week. On Thursday, IDPH reported 192 new deaths from COVID-19, including 13 people under age 60.

"I look at it and I say how can people not follow the mitigations, watching the number of people who are passing away, not just in the state of Illinois but the thousands now a day, across the United States," Pritzker said. "I just hope that people are heading the mitigations that we're asking them to follow, because that, ultimately, is going to bring that death count down."

The governor said he would ensure that public health messaging aimed at convincing people not to host or attend family gatherings or potential "superspreader" events is distributed more widely than it was ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

"It's not that people necessarily saw it and specifically ignored it, I think there are people who may not have realized what it is they were portending for the state and for themselves when they went to a Thanksgiving gathering that they had been hoping to go to," he said. "I do think people are making different plans for the Christmas holiday or for Hanukkah or other celebratory holidays and am very hopeful, anyway, that we can divert people from having large family gatherings so that we don't have yet a third surge on top of this potential second surge."

While coronavirus hospitalizations in Illinois have declined by about 10 percent, fewer than 20 percent of staffed hospital beds are still available, according to IDPH. As of Wednesday night, there were 1,170 COVID-19 patients in Illinois intensive care units, with 1,537 non-coronavirus patients and 600 open beds.

"I don't want to say we have a lot of beds available," Pritzker said. "I mean, we have beds, but people should not see that as some sort of invitation that we should reduce mitigations and therefore fill up all the beds because there's a vacancy somehow."

Ezike said Illinois has yet to record a case of someone getting infected with COVID-19 twice, although there are reports from other places of increasing numbers of people who were infected earlier this year and have contracted the virus again.

"What that tells us is we're not clear on the duration of these antibodies once someone is infected," Ezike said, noting everyone who contracts COVID-19 may not have the same antibody response.

"Please understand with this novel — meaning new — coronavirus, there are questions that have to be answered with the tincture of time. As we go further along, we will know more. So we can't know everything about this new virus the day it hits, the year it hits, with time, we will learn more, and we will share as we learn."