If You’re Fully Vaccinated, You Probably Don’t Need to Quarantine If Exposed to COVID-19

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says people who are fully vaccinated probably don’t need to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19.
• Experts say the vaccines have proven to be highly effective at preventing serious disease, although the research isn’t conclusive yet on how well vaccines stop transmission of the virus.
• Experts advise people who have been vaccinated to still follow safety protocols such as mask wearing and handwashing.

Fully vaccinated people who meet certain criteria no longer need to quarantine if exposed to COVID-19.

That’s the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The advisory says that people don’t need to quarantine if:

• They are fully vaccinated.
• They are within 3 months of receiving the final dose in the series.
• They have no symptoms since exposure to COVID-19.

“Individual and societal benefits of avoiding unnecessary quarantine may outweigh the potential but unknown risk of transmission, and facilitate the direction of public health resources to persons at highest risk for transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. This recommendation to waive quarantine for people with vaccine-derived immunity aligns with quarantine recommendations for those with natural immunity, which eases implementation,” the CDC states.

Those who don’t meet the criteria should continue to follow quarantine guidelines if exposed to a person with COVID-19.

Public health experts say the latest update to quarantine guidelines is good news.

“This is really an indication that the government and other agencies around the world are feeling comfortable that these vaccines are, in fact, going to give us more freedom to be able to go back to some kind of semblance of normal behavior,” Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford University in California, told Healthline.