Since January 8th, infected people (as well as contact persons) can test themselves free after five days – it used to be ten days. In view of the sharp increase in the number of sick people with the Omikron variant and the resulting loss of workforce, demands were made by the economy, but also by the City of Vienna, for the quarantine to be shortened.
In its meeting on Friday, the state-wide Covid crisis coordination (Gecko) addressed the question of whether triple vaccinated people with a negative PCR test should be released from isolation from the third day. And came to the conclusion that “the implementation of this project is not recommended”.
Because it is expected that infected people will still be positive after three days. So one cannot expect a major impact on the protection of critical infrastructure. However, it would mean a lot more work for the health authorities if they would have to record the status of every positive case and issue a corresponding notification. “If the number of cases was very high, that would probably no longer be feasible,” says Gecko. And also notes: Tests on the third day and then again on the fifth day for most of the infected would “also be at the expense of the already scarce PCR capacities”.
Source: Nachrichten
