It’s Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now. Here’s a Guide.

A case of Covid no longer means isolating for five days, according to the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday. It’s the latest sign of the virus’s normalization four years after it upended our lives.

You should now follow the same precautions with Covid as you take with the flu, according to new guidelines from the CDC. That means staying home until you’ve gone a day with no fever and improving symptoms. Take other precautions for the next five days, including wearing a mask and limiting close contact with others.

Those are the same steps the CDC recommends for other respiratory viruses.

“Covid-19 is still an important public health threat, but it is not the emergency that it once was,” said Dr. Brendan Jackson, who leads the respiratory virus response for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, on Friday.