Dr. Manoj Jain answers your COVID-19 questions
Question: What do I need to do if I am COVID-19 positive?
Answer: One in 22 Americans have become positive for COVID-19. Each day in Shelby County, about 450 people receive news that their COVID-19 test is positive.
It is important to know how you can help yourself and others be safe, even when you or a loved one is infected with the coronavirus.
To protect others you need to be in isolation. Isolation is a legal action which is described in the Tennessee state law where the health department or your personal doctor has the authority to place restrictions on you for public safety.
What does isolation mean?
When you are in isolation, you are restricted from leaving your home, or receiving visitors to your home. You are to avoid contact with others, including family even in the home by wearing a mask and maintaining a distance of 6 feet separation.
You need to monitor for fever, a temperature over 100.4, cough or shortness of breath. If you have any such symptoms you need to call your doctor or the emergency room. All this has to be maintained for 10 days.
There is no need to retest to be out of isolation after the 10 days, but you need to be symptom-free for 48 hours before being out of isolation.
What is quarantine?
While isolation is for the person who is infected with the virus, quarantine is for those who have been in close-contact with the infected person. So your family members, if in your close-contact — less than six feet, for a cumulative of 15 minutes — would be placed in quarantine. Quarantine is also a legal action, and the guidelines have been recently modified.
Before, quarantine was to be maintained for 14 days. But now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shortened it to 10 days, or seven days if the person tests negative on day seven. People need to know that with the shortened quarantine time up to 10% of close-contacts may develop an infection after the seven or 10 days.
If you are over 55 and with underlying chronic illnesses, then you may be eligible for medications like monoclonal antibodies which can prevent hospitalizations and severe illness. It is important to contact your doctor.
What are my chances of coming severely ill?
About one of 10 people who are diagnosed with COVID-19 are hospitalized. One in four of the hospitalized patients will need to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. A significant amount of the people in the ICU will be on the breathing machine or a ventilator and half of these may die.
COVID-19 is a serious disease which is filling up our hospitals, and threatens to leave no room for those who are having a heart attack, stroke or a urine infection.
To prevent this, we need to be thinking and acting “upstream” from the hospitalization by breaking the chain of transmission of the COVID-19 infection by lawfully following through with quarantine and isolation.
Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician in Memphis, is also a member of the City of Memphis-shelby County Joint COVID Task Force.