THURSDAY, Aug. 27, 2020 — Experts are alarmed about revised U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> guidelines advising that people who don’t have symptoms of COVID-19<\/a> don’t need to be tested, even if they’ve recently been exposed to the new coronavirus.<\/p>\n The guidelines were quietly changed this week and prompted concern among infectious disease professionals, The New York Times<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n They noted the importance of identifying infected people in the short period of time immediately before they develop symptoms and may be most contagious<\/a>.<\/p>\n About half of coronavirus transmissions can be traced back to people in this pre-symptomatic stage, models suggest.<\/p>\n Experts warned that the revised CDC guidelines could delay treatment and lead to wider spread of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n “This is potentially dangerous,” Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician in Palo Alto, Calif., told the Times<\/i>. Limiting testing to people with obvious symptoms of COVID-19<\/a> means “you’re not looking for a lot of people who are potential spreaders of disease,” she said. “I feel like this is going to make things worse.”<\/p>\n “I think it’s bizarre,” Daniel Larremore, a mathematician and infectious diseases modeler at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Times<\/i>. “Any move right now to reduce levels of testing by changing guidelines is a step in the wrong direction.”<\/p>\n “Wow, that is a walk-back,” Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, told the Times<\/i>. “We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and that’s a really big change.”<\/p>\n She’s concerned that people could misinterpret the change in testing guidelines as meaning that people without symptoms can’t pass the coronavirus on to others, a misconception that experts have long tried to dispel.<\/p>\n “If people are getting exposed, and they’re not getting tested, and they’re not isolating, that’s a huge problem,” Kuppalli warned.<\/p>\n “Testing capacity has massively expanded, and we are not utilizing the full capacity that we have developed,” a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told the Times<\/i>. “We revised the guidance to reflect current evidence and the best public health interventions.”<\/p>\n ![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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