CDC Director: Human behavior played into shortening recommended isolation period for COVID cases

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky acknowledged Wednesday that human behavior played into the latest guidelines for how long individuals with coronavirus should quarantine.

In an appearance on CNN, Walensky was pressed about how and why the CDC reduced its recommended isolation period from 10 days to five days for people who had tested positive for COVID-19 and were asymptomatic by that time. Walensky said most transmission of the virus occurred in the immediate days before and after developing symptoms of the disease.

As she added "people need to get back to work," Walensky said the behavioral science aspect of it came into play as well.

"From what you're saying, it sounds like this decision had just as much to do with business as it did with the science," fill-in anchor Kaitlan Collins said.


"It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate," Walensky said, saying studies showed a majority of Americans weren't isolating when they "need to." "And so we really want to make sure that we had guidance in this moment — where we were going to have a lot of disease — that could be adhered to, that people were willing to adhere to and that spoke specifically to when people were maximally infectious."