Home for the holidays
Similar to its pre-Thanksgiving advisory, the CDC also recommends people avoid travel during the upcoming winter holidays. “The best way to protect yourself and others is to postpone travel and stay home,” Dr. Walke said.
If people do decide to travel, the agency recommends COVID-19 testing 1-3 days prior to travel and again 3-5 days afterward, as well as reducing nonessential activities for a full 7 days after returning home. Furthermore, if someone does not have follow-up testing, the CDC recommends reducing nonessential activities for 10 days.
Testing does not eliminate all risk, Dr. Walke said, “but when combined with reducing nonessential activities, symptom screening and continuing with precautions like wearing masks, social distancing and hand washing, it can make travel safer.”
“We are trying to reduce the number of infections by postponing travel over the winter holiday,” Cindy Friedman, MD, chief of the CDC Travelers’ Health Branch, said during the media briefing.
“Travel volume was high during Thanksgiving,” she said, “and even if only a small percentage of those travelers were asymptomatically infected, this can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional infections moving from one community to another.”
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.