New Delhi: The Union Health Ministry on Monday reiterated that there is no risk of COVID-19 transmission from patients discharged from hospitals or COVID care centres.
“Available evidence does not indicate any increase in the risk of transmission from patients discharged based on the revised discharge criteria. The revised criterion also specifies that such patients will follow home isolation for a further 7 days,” said a senior official in the Health Ministry to ETV Bharat.
The Ministry meanwhile issued revised guidelines for home isolation of very mild and pre-symptomatic COVID-19 people.
Patients under home isolation will end home isolation after 17 days of onset of symptoms (or date of sampling, for pre-symptomatic cases) and no fever for 10 days.
“There is no need for testing after the home isolation period is over,” the Health Ministry official said.
Referring to the revised COVID-19 discharge policy of the government, the official said that several countries have changed the criteria for discharge from the ‘test-based strategy to ‘symptom-based strategy’ or 'time-based' strategy.
“A review of ICMR laboratory surveillance data also indicated that after initial rt-PCR positive results, patients became negative after a median duration of 10 days. Recent studies have also suggested that the viral load peaks in the pre-symptomatic period (2 days before symptoms) and goes down over the next 7 days,” the official said.
The Health Ministry further said that there is no need to get tested after the home isolation period is over.
As per the latest revised discharge policy, there is no need for testing prior to discharge all pre-symptomatic, very mild, mild confirmed cases of COVID-19 after 10 days of symptom onset and no fever for 3 days.
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