{"id":4014,"date":"2021-07-20T09:45:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T14:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/?p=4014"},"modified":"2021-06-30T14:13:45","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T19:13:45","slug":"publication-alert-de-isolation-of-covid19-patients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/2021\/07\/20\/publication-alert-de-isolation-of-covid19-patients\/","title":{"rendered":"Publication Alert: De-Isolation of COVID19 Patients"},"content":{"rendered":"
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UNMC ID Fellowship graduate (’21), Clayton Mowrer, D.O., MBA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Content by Dr. Clayton Mowrer<\/em>, 2021 UNMC ID graduate<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the pandemic, it became clear that patients with COVID-19 can demonstrate prolonged detection of viral RNA (as along as weeks to months), which can lead to prolonged hospitalizations, especially for those patients with more severe disease. One of the difficulties often encountered in managing these patients was in determining how long they were required to be in isolation. Initially, the policy for removal of isolation at UNMC involved two sequential negative molecular testing 24 hours apart. However, after studies surfaced demonstrating the probability of isolating replication-competent SARS-CoV-2 virus was rare after 14 days of illness and at cycle-threshold (Ct) values greater than 30, UNMC revised our policy to reflect a conservative approach based on these findings. In June 2020, the revised policy stated that, in a patient who continues to test positive, isolation precautions could be removed 21 days after 1st<\/sup> positive test after review by the COVID ID team.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this study recently published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology<\/a><\/em>, we set out to: <\/p>\n\n\n\n