Test and Protect
- Test and Protect has now been operating for more than four months and is doing what we need it to – identifying positive cases and tracing their close contacts so they can get appropriate public health advice to limit the spread of the virus.
- It is still essential to continue with other measures to reduce transmission: physical distancing, hand and respiratory hygiene, and appropriate use of face coverings.
Complex cases, including those involving key and emergency service workers, are escalated to experienced teams
- We cannot offer blanket assurances that certain workforces can be exempt from isolation.
- If co-workers have been maintaining appropriate physical distancing, then they may have no or few close contacts.
- If a case is wearing PPE, a risk assessment to assess close contacts is needed.
- In complex cases, specialist public health advice and management will be required.
- It is essential that employers carry out a Covid-19 risk assessment to reduce the risk of transmission in the workplace and have robust plans in place to manage the impact of workforce absence due to isolation.
Self-Isolation
- We currently advise that if someone has been identified as a close contact of a COVID case they have to self-isolate for 14 days. This 14-day period is critical to prevent the virus from spreading because it can take up to 14 days for an infected person to develop the illness (the incubation period). This means that if they get tested and receive a negative result before the 14 days have passed, we cannot be sure that the illness will not develop. If they leave isolation before these 14 days are complete, they could potentially spread the virus in the community.
- A close contact is defined as a person who, in the infectious period from 48 hours prior to and 10 days after the confirmed case’s symptom onset, or date a positive test was taken if asymptomatic, had at least one of the following types of exposure
- Household contact: those who share the household or have spent a significant amount of time in the house without social distancing or This also includes cleaners, even if the index case is not present due to the invasive nature of this job.
- Direct contact: close contact outside the house without PPE, of within one metre of index case.
- Proximity contact: close contact without PPE for more than 15 minutes between 1 and 2 metres of index case.