Catalan Health Dpt to follow state guidelines and eliminate quarantine for vaccinated close contacts

BarcelonaThe fully vaccinated will not have to quarantine for ten days if they are in close contact with a person infected with the Omicrion variant. In the end, the Catalan Department of Health will not carry out its Public Health protocol, which prescribed preventive isolation for all close contacts, regardless of whether they were vaccinated or not. Instead, the agreement reached by the Public Health Commission – a weekly meeting between the Spanish Ministry of Health and experts representing the regional governments – will prevail. On Tuesday this measure was reversed, as requested by the Madrid regional government.

The Department announced on Wednesday that despite the expansion of the variant Omicron, which is much more transmissible and has the ability to bypass the protection offered by vaccines, Catalonia "will follow the state recommendation to avoid further confusion among citizens and health professionals". In a statement, he also explained that both Catalonia's Public Health Agency and the covid advisory committee asked the Commission to publicise the scientific criteria that motivated this change.

The contradictory messages between Catalonia and the Spanish government began on Tuesday evening, shortly after it was confirmed that Spain had achieved the highest number of reported infections in a single day since the pandemic broke out: 49,823 cases in the last 24 hours. The Ministry of Health reported that close contacts were exempt from quarantine if they were fully vaccinated. Instead, they were only asked to limit their social interaction to the maximum and only carry out "essential activities" for ten days. The Catalan Health Department believes this wording is risky, especially if the contact works in shops, tourism, teaching or customer service in general.

At 11 p.m., the Catalan Health Department issued an urgent statement "not to add more confusion to the public" in which it assured that the Spanish Health Ministry, led by Carolina Darias, had changed its own protocol in just under twenty days and that since the Department would evaluate "what actions" could be carried out to implement a Catalan protocol, as planned. Given that Omicron's advance seems unstoppable, the Health Department said it wanted to ensure "effective control of covid" and defended the need to maintain its public health indications. In fact, they pointed out that the Spanish Health Ministry "differs from its own previously published scientific criteria", and that there are doubts about the "applicability" of the new guideline. However, the Catalan Health Department decided not to bring its own protocol into force.

Last December 1 the Spanish Health Ministry updated the Public Health protocol to stipulate that everyone who had been in contact with an Omicron case (as well as beta and gamma variants, although they have a very anecdotal presence in Spain) had to quarantine. The measure is difficult to police when there is community transmission, as already happens throughout Europe. With the latest amendment, however, the ministry limits the ten-day quarantine to unvaccinated contacts or people with compromised immune systems due to their extreme fragility.