How do you protect your family or your household if someone has been diagnosed with COVID?
If someone in your household has COVID, there are absolutely things that you can do
to protect the rest of your household members from further exposure.
Remember, because some people have the same shared social experiences, you may have already
been exposed. But that doesn't always translate to a hundred percent chance of getting sick.
It's important to know that people are contagious two days before they show symptoms, so even though
you've had some exposure what I'm going to tell you is how to put protective measures in place
to prevent further exposure and thereby really protecting as many people in the household
from catching COVID-19. This is particularly important if you have older people in your
house like grandparents or unvaccinated people such as children under the age of 12.
So what can you do? Everything you do should be regardless of someone's vaccination status.
You should quarantine the person who is sick to a single room and to use a single bathroom.
Of course, people can interact with that person, but you need to wear protective gear.
The ill person and anybody who enters that room needs to be wearing snug masks. It's really
important that the masks are snug to your face whenever you're in the room together. You need to
make sure that you're trying to do everything you can from anything contagious, from going between
the sick person and the caregiver. The caregiver of course can bring things in and out of the
room. You need to bring food and drink to the ill person. You can absolutely do that,
but every time you hand something off, every time you bring in the food and then you put it down
onto a surface that's been touched by the ill person or you actually hand it to the ill person,
you want to make sure that immediately you clean your hands with either alcohol hand sanitizer or
soap and water before you reach up to your eyes, your nose, your mouth or your mask. Remember that
the way that you contract this particular virus is it has to enter through your face,
so you want to make sure that whatever you touch, you can touch whatever you want, but you need to
clean your hands before you go up to this area. For example, you can either use disposable dishes,
you can have those just thrown away or you can take the dishes, of course ,you can take them out
of the room but now you need to go straight to the sink, you need to immediately wash them and
then before you touch your face and your mask and other things around the house you want to clean
your own hands with soap and water or alcohol. If you cannot dedicate a bathroom to the sick person,
if people have to share it, then you need to clean it between the times people use it you need to put
cleaning wipes in the bathroom so that everybody can clean objects before they touch them.
It's really important that everybody in the house needs to assume that they may have already been
exposed, so between the interactions of not only the person, to the person who's ill,
but people to one another in the house, they need to be wearing masks and they need
to really be attentive to the spacing between themselves. So wearing masks and staying away,
six feet ,whether they're awake or sleeping, is going to be very very important. This is the best
way that you can make sure that you don't contract or spread the virus in a household, unless you're
really alone in a room you can take off your mask. If you're alone, if you're really distant,
then you again can go ahead and do what you need to do, but you want to make sure that high touch
objects, if you're handing off to one another, that you do clean them. Before you do that,
remember that with Delta virus most people become sick within three to seven days of a
household member becoming ill. The full incubation period is still true all the way up to 14 days,
but generally it's usually within a week because the load in a household is so high, so you want
to be attentive if you are feeling any symptoms whatsoever. Mild scratchy throat, a little bit
of a runny nose, a slight headache, you want to be tested right away. This is the best way that you
can prevent this particular virus from spreading in the homes and many people have been very
successful in being able to keep it really limited in their household when they have a diagnosis.