An op-ed, “The coronavirus quarantine problem for travelers and nursing homes,” authored by Simon Johnson, Dr. Sanjat Kanjilal, and Dr. Larissa Lucas was published in The Boston Globe this week. The authors of the op-ed continue to work closely with Mass Senior Care on a number of strategies and policies related to infection control, testing and PPE procurement.
The OpEd calls on the state to offer a sounder approach for travelers and nursing home residents who need to quarantine for 14 days. “For new arrivals into nursing homes, a blanket two-week quarantine period has serious consequences for residents who were recently hospitalized for serious illness and need intense physical and mental rehabilitation for recovery. Therefore, we propose that the new quarantine test-out rules for travelers also be applied to new residents entering nursing homes. This makes intuitive sense as the issue is the same in both instances: to prevent the introduction of COVID-19 into a population by people arriving from another location. The strategy of two virus tests at least five days apart would significantly reduce isolation time while maintaining the safety of the community.” Read the full op-ed here.
Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and cofounder of the Immune Observatory. Dr. Sanjat Kanjilal is a lecturer in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute, and an infectious diseases physician and an associate medical director of microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Larissa Lucas is a medical director at North Shore Physicians Group and a nursing home medical director.