China Daily:

As Ms. Jiao mentioned, according to the ninth edition of China's COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment guidelines, recovered patients only need to monitor their condition at home for seven days after being discharged from quarantine locations or hospital, instead of conducting health monitoring and 14-day quarantine after being discharged from hospital. Could you please tell us the reasons for those modifications?

Jiao Yahui:

Thank you for your question. As we mentioned before, relevant studies have shown that the live virus can not be separated from samples if a patient's cycle threshold value is greater than or equal to 35. Given that, we have made such a modification. First, it is no longer contagious when the cycle threshold value is greater than or equal to 35. On the other hand, given on our study on reconfirmed positive cases in China, the epidemiological survey has demonstrated that those cases had not caused any transmissions or infections. Therefore, patients can be discharged from hospital when their cycle threshold values reach 35.

Second, the previous requirement that patients should spend 14 days in centralized quarantine or go to rehabilitation hospitals was based on our general experience. Now that we have proved it's non-infectious, it's reasonable to adopt at-home isolation and monitoring rather than centralized quarantine. Another adjustment is the change from 14 days to seven days. According to hospitals' observation on recovered patients infected with the Delta variant as well as those infected with the Omicron variant, their body functions can recover within seven days basically; thus, the time has been shortened from 14 days to seven days. Given our observations, research, and analysis of clinically diagnosed cases, we cut the time and adopted at-home isolation instead of centralized quarantine. Notably, in spite of staying at home, the patients still have to strictly implement health monitoring. Thank you.