In this morning’s Wall Street Journal (which has a lot of good medical articles BTW), there was mention of the possibility of a lot of people being asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioned about taking our eyes of the ball and focusing on these people. There are a lot of infectious diseases that can be carried by people without sickening them. We don’t know how clinically significant these individuals are. The ones that we need to worry about are the sick ones who are actively shedding the virus.
Here is an excerpt from the latest version on Covid -19 from UpToDate, a web-based text used by a lot of physicians. This has to do with someone who is sick and choses to stay home until they are better. I know, that’s a novel idea. How long do they need to stay home?
“When a non-test-based strategy is used, patients may discontinue home isolation when the following criteria are met:
- At least seven days have passed since symptoms first appeared AND
- At least three days (72 hours) have passed since recovery of symptoms (defined as resolution of fever without the use of fever-reducing medications and improvement in respiratory symptoms [eg, cough, shortness of breath])”
We did our first tests today as planned. We only had a few minor glitches. We still only have a handful of tests and are only testing people who are symptomatic. We hope to have more tests available later in the week. Remember, thus far, only 10% of people who have been tested nationwide are positive for Covid-19!
