If you’re overwhelmed, you’re not the only one. In the week and a half since the CDC said that it was planning to update its isolation guidance, I’ve heard almost exclusively harsh reactions from experts, who have criticized the recommendations as convoluted, wishy-washy, and even unscientific. The guidance reads like a nightmarish choose-your-own-adventure book, they’ve told me. It lacks crucial caveats, can’t seem to make up its mind on the role of testing, and asks people to do so, so much before they can get back to daily life. “It’s a hot mess,” one researcher told me. “Unnecessarily confusing,” someone else decreed. “Of all the communication stumbles since February 2020, this one ranks in the top three,” another said.
Such a mess has, unfortunately, become par for the course in the CDC’s handling of the pandemic. The agency is yet again punting the responsibility of infection control to the masses; allowing people’s fates to splinter by timing, by testing, by … whatever, is hardly good incentive for the public to read the instructions, much less follow them to a T. At a time when Omicron cases are already shattering records nationwide, the costs of muddled messaging are extraordinarily high. I asked Alison Buttenheim, who studies the intersection of vaccines and human behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, if she thought people would just give up on trying to parse the guidelines and simply improvise their own end-of-isolation rules. “I think people already have,” she said.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member