On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines urging people who are actively infectious with COVID-19 to return to schools and workplaces, thereby exposing their coworkers and the general public to the virus.
Under these guidelines, workers are encouraged to return to work 24 hours after their last fever, a period during which the vast majority of COVID-19 patients remain actively infectious.
The CDC’s policy change is being implemented under conditions where COVID-19 is circulating at a higher level than during the same time in any previous year of the pandemic and all restrictions on the virus’s spread have been dropped.
Due to the ending of all pandemic surveillance after the Biden administration scrapped the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration last May, the circulation of COVID can now only be seen through wastewater data.
The CDC’s new policy lumps COVID-19 together with other respiratory viruses, including seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), encouraging all those infected with these pathogens to report to work and resume normal activities.
At least one-quarter of working Americans lack any sick leave, which is often taken from their paid time off (PTO). Among private-sector workers, only 40 percent of the lowest-paid workers are provided sick leave.
Now, bosses and managers can invoke the CDC’s guidelines to demand that their employees come to work sick or risk being fired.
Every aspect of the new guidelines contradicts well-known scientific truths about COVID-19: Without testing, patients cannot determine by themselves whether or not they are infectious;
a large percentage of COVID-19 transmission is through asymptomatic patients; fever is only one of over a dozen COVID-19 symptoms; upwards of 20-40 percent of COVID-19 patients are still infectious after five days, with some remaining infectious for more than a week.
The guidelines are in direct contrast to the basic principles of public health, which aim to limit the spread of all pathogens and minimize the morbidity and mortality burden suffered by society.
Instead of advocating for an expansion of paid sick leave for all workers, mass testing, contact tracing, and other basic public health measures for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV, the CDC reduced its isolation recommendation for all respiratory viruses to the bare minimum and no longer encourages testing for COVID-19.
This is only the latest in a continuous stream of unscientific policy changes by the CDC, which has discredited itself in the eyes of all serious scientists, doctors, and anti-COVID advocates over the course of the pandemic.
Denouncing the CDC guidelines change, Dr. Lucky Tran, a science communicator at Columbia University, told, “The changes in the CDC guidelines are really a result of political and corporate pressure. It’s a dangerous change that goes against the science, encourages disease spread, and prioritizes corporate interests, making it easier to exploit workers.”
Dr. Ellie Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told, “It’s not good science. It’s not good public health. It doesn’t provide people with accurate information.”
Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, also told,
“The overwhelmingly abundant evidence for this virus over the past 4 years tells us that it is a far more dangerous pathogen than flu, which lacks seasonality, is still evolving, has induced Long COVID in tens of millions of people throughout the world and cannot be ‘FLU-ified.’”
Indeed, the CDC’s own data, including the “Background” document justifying its latest policy change, make clear that COVID-19 remains far more dangerous than the flu, RSV, or any other seasonal virus.
In the first week of February 2024, close to 1,600 people died of COVID-19 in the United States.
Since August 26, 2023, for 24 consecutive weeks or nearly half the calendar year, the official weekly death toll in the US has remained over 1,000.
While 5,748 Americans died from the flu in 2023, more than 77,000 perished from COVID-19.
