CDC States How, When Health Workers With Covid-19 Can Be on Duty

Health-care workers who test positive for Covid-19 must receive two subsequent negative tests before they can return to work, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is advising.

Workers who exhibit symptoms of Covid-19 and don’t get tested can return to work if their symptoms improve and they remain fever-free for three days, according to the CDC guidelines. Covid-19 is the lung disease caused by the new coronavirus.

There is a shortage of tests in many areas, and health-care workers are among those affected. If health workers present symptoms and are unable to get tested, the CDC says they can’t return to work until they are fever-free without fever-reducing medication for at least three days, their other symptoms improve, and it has been at least seven days since the symptoms first appeared.

Covid-19 can cause some patients to experience severe symptoms, but many of those afflicted—including health workers—experience milder reactions, akin to a bad cold. The CDC guidelines for health workers are crucial for handling those milder cases as hospitals are coping with staffing shortages.

The CDC is facing a barrage of questions from hospitals about who can work under what circumstances. For health workers who are suspected Covid-19 cases, the agency describes two separate strategies for handling their return to work, a “test-based strategy” and a “non-test-based strategy.” The CDC earlier this month issued different guidelines to the medical community allowing workers who had exposure to a patient with Covid-19 but were asymptomatic to continue work if their facility was short-staffed.

Health workers are practiced at mitigating the spread of infections from patient to patient and from patients to themselves. The questions from health facilities come as the U.S. health system is increasingly strained in treating patients with Covid-19, and some hospitals are exhausting all their options.

The CDC also must grapple with the advice federal health officials are telling the public: to stay home and distance from others because early studies show that the new coronavirus can be transmitted before people carrying it present any symptoms. Health-care workers are concerned about their safety due to a lack of personal protective equipment like gloves and masks.

Confusion

Some hospitals have mixed up the two return-to-work strategies and are telling their employees that they can return to work even if they’ve had a positive test.

For example, Southwest Georgia-based Phoebe Putney Health System CEO Scott Steiner said in a statement that a CDC representative told him workers who test positive can work as long as they follow the conditions for “non-test-based” strategy: fever-free for three days and at least seven days since they experienced symptoms. In fact, those workers need to receive two subsequent negative tests before returning to work.

The CDC is advising hospitals that decisions about returning to work for health-care personnel “with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 should be made in the context of local circumstances.” Hospitals are concerned that they could see shortages of workers as more of their employees contract the virus.

When confirmed or suspected Covid-19 health practitioners return to their jobs, they should wear a face mask at all times until their symptoms are completely resolved or 14 days after their illness starts, the CDC says. Those workers shouldn’t treat severely immunocompromised patients.

“Until you really understand how many are asymptomatic and asymptomatically passing the virus on, we think it’s better for the entire American public to know that the risk of serious illness may be low, but they could be potentially spreading the virus to others,” Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said at a March 14 press conference.