And while those are the new guidelines for those who test positive - how should you know when to get tested? With so many new cases popping up all around us, at work, at home, and in social circles, when should you go and get tested?
The hosts asked Dr Diaz when you should go in for a swab:
Dr. Melissa Diaz Musa, Deputy Director, Central Health Region
"We are still recommending testing as much as possible, specifically if you have know one in your family that you know is infected, or that you haven't had a close contact and you start with symptoms, we need to know because then we need to know where you work, we need to know where you've been, who else has been exposed. Sometimes when we have 5, 6 family members positive and somebody else start with mild symptoms who are not in the vulnerable group, we have to make that assumption that that person has covid, so everybody stay at home, keep your house well ventilated, wipe down everything with your Clorox and water, hand washing, wearing your mask - these things will help to reduce and spread and more importantly don't allow anybody in your home and don't go out to visit anybody at this time when you have symptoms."
"An important part of testing is the timing of the test again so just yesterday we had a lot of people and we had to go through one by one just discussing with them, okay when were you exposed and they would say, oh somebody in my workplace tested positive this morning and I was with them 10 minutes ago. Well it's too early. Your body wont convert as yet and when you test and you have a negative test, it gives a false reassurance that you are not infected, but you may be in the incubation period and the incubation period for the Covid virus is anytime from day 1 to day 14, now we do see that with OMICRON the incubation period has lessened to two to three days or around that time, with Delta it was longer, with Delta we were seeing 8 days after exposure somebody tested positive, so the timing of the test is key and we are asking persons that if you are exposed or if you do start with very mild symptoms, just isolate, let your workplace know and stay away from your family, wear your mask and after three days of isolation come in and get tested and that will be a much more accurate test, because you may hear stories that okay people tested 3 times negative or 2 times negative on PCR. But even if you do a PCR and rapid test hours after exposure, you will come out negative. It has to be the optimal time, 3 to 5 days after last exposure with the person who tested positive."
