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Just five days instead of 14? According to a contribution by virologist Christian Drosten, numerous politicians have advocated for a shorter quarantine period. Now it is clear: the virologist meant something completely different.
In the debate on shortening the quarantine time in suspected corona cases, Berlin virologist Christian Drosten made it clear that he had not proposed a reduction of this time from 14 to five days. “Isolation and quarantine mix,” Drosten wrote on the short message service Twitter on Friday. His suggestion is to reduce the isolation time for so-called clusters, that is, the case where a whole group of people has had contact with a person infected with corona. Five days of isolation would be enough, according to the virologist.
In principle, the quarantine applies to individual people who have had contact with infected people; this is ordered by the health department. Isolation applies to infected people. Also referring to Drosten’s statement, a debate had emerged about a shortened quarantine period, in which numerous politicians had spoken out in favor of a shortened quarantine. “We know that the vast majority of people are no longer contagious five days after the onset of symptoms, even if the PCR test still shows a positive result,” said SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach.
In early August, Drosten had addressed the importance of clusters, that is, accumulations of corona infections, in an article for the weekly “Die Zeit”. Among other things, he wrote: “If we look at more recent data on virus excretion, it is enough to isolate group members for five days.” He would call this “quarantine and isolation mix ‘cooling” so as not to dilute the terminology. “At the end of these five days, the group members could be screened.
