An increased emphasis has been made of late on the principles of isolation and quarantine, to diminish the opportunities for COVID-19 to continue its latest charge. To know who needs to be isolated, testing is again the watchword on the lips of medical professionals and a Biden administration desperate to turn the corner on the omicron variant.
Fatigue from the prolonged slugfest with the virus has left many frustrated and scratching their heads while at the same time scrambling anew to find a testing site. Appointment times at chain pharmacies were hard to come by locally last week, and the traffic at testing sites provided by Surry County was brisk.
Locally, the Surry County Health and Nutrition Center is still holding nearly daily testing operations at various locations throughout the county (See accompanying graphic for dates, times, and locations).
“Even with everyone’s weariness in dealing with this pandemic for almost two years, we must get boosted and vaccinated to keep us from getting severely ill if we get infected,” said Gov. Roy Cooper as he toured a testing site last week in Kinston.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is working to improve the availability of COVID testing and, “is pulling all available levers to support existing testing sites, to open more sites across the state and to increase access to at-home collection kits.”
New contracts were announced last week with two additional testing vendors to improve options and increase the footprint of testing to cover hundreds of no-cost testing sites across the state. The announcement said, “More than a million professional rapid antigen tests, at-home rapid antigen tests and at-home collection kits are beginning to arrive in the state.”
“Before case numbers began breaking records, we already were working with our vendors to secure more testing kits and testing supplies,” said Departent of Health and Human Services Secretary Kody H. Kinsley Thursday.
North Carolina’s statewide testing volume reached more than 564,000 tests last week. With such high testing numbers, the state has ordered an additional 700,000 professional and at-home rapid test kits, bringing the total on their way to the state to more than 1 million. The state heath department has also delivered more than 250,000 swabs, antigen kits and other testing supplies to their testing partners statewide.
Omicron has managed to run through a large number of people who had so far eluded the virus, and recently the number of breakthrough infections has been on the rise as well. Testing is key at this time to identify those who have been infected and stop the spread by isolation.
For clarification isolation relates to behavior after a confirmed infection. Quarantine refers to the time following exposure to the virus or close contact with someone known to have COVID.
CDC guidelines currently hold that for those who test positive but do not have symptoms, an isolation period of at least five days is needed. People who are asymptomatic, who do not have the obvious symptoms like fever, aches, or cough, may feel like they are well when they are not.
Those with symptoms should stay isolated until they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours. As with previous variants, people became contagious two to four days after infection, and people remained contagious a couple of days after symptoms subside.
Dr. Amy Karger of the University of Minnesota Medical School recommends that people test themselves at three days and five days after exposure. “A lot of people are turning positive by day three,” she said in referring to omicron. “There’s basically an opportunity here to catch people earlier than you would with the other variants. If you only have one test, it’s fine to wait until day five.”
Data from the United Kingdom has shown their daily case rate falling dramatically in a short period of time, and experts in the US feel expect a similar trend. Ali Mokdad, a health metrics professor at University Washington Seattle, said based on their models the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6. “It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” he said of the infection rate.
As the calendar edges closer to the start of the third year of COVID, Secretary Kinsley echoed a similar refrain, “Getting vaccinated, getting a booster as soon as you are eligible, and wearing a mask are the three best things you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones during this surge of COVID-19 cases.”
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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