Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

And I am Megan McCarty-Karino and for Chi-Riz-Dult. Thank you so much for joining us this Thursday.

It is Thursday indeed. We are so close to the end of the week and we are going to talk about the news and end in some make me smiles.

But let's get started with a news fix, Megan, why don't you go first.

Okay, so I have been watching this change that the CDC made to its guidelines.

I've been seeing a lot of response from folks on my timeline. People texting me.

Some people are pretty upset about it. Some folks think it's reasonable.

So I thought I'd just, you know, get into it. Have a little chitchat about it. See what people think.

So, you know, it's not. There aren't any huge changes in these revised CDC guidelines for COVID.

They kind of affect school policies. They might affect some businesses.

Obviously, CDC guidelines are not law and a lot of states and counties are sort of doing their own thing anyway.

But I think, you know, a lot of school districts, businesses, they look to the CDC.

Counties look to the CDC and setting their policies. So this is of course important.

And it's just signals to everyday people, I think, you know, kind of what to pay attention to.

So they have changed quarantine guidelines for unvaccinated folks with a known exposure to be the same as vaccinated folks, which is that you do not have to quarantine at all unless you test positive.

So if you know you have some sort of contact with someone who has COVID, don't have to quarantine if you're unvaccinated, which brings in a line with what the guidelines have been for those who are vaccinated.

So that sort of is recognizing, you know, that so many people, the majority of people in the country and probably the world at this point have some sort of immunity to COVID either through vaccination or natural infection or some combination of both.

Distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated has kind of lost a lot of meaning. They no longer recommend asymptomatic screening for most workplaces for school.

So that's, you know, kids were tested in order to go to school or if you were getting tested in order to go to work, they no longer recommend that, you know, just sort of like screening every week or every few days or that kind of thing.

Just testing for the sake of testing. Exactly sort of surveillance testing, I guess is what screening surveillance testing don't recommend that no more six foot rule six foot rules taken out of their guidelines.

I think for a lot of us this feels like, yeah, no six, you know, six foot is not the magic thing, but you know a lot of schools have have still kind of been having to apply this to classrooms.

Yeah, exactly spacing out desks having these specific cohorts and lunch and everything like that. So it could be kind of more of a big deal for schools.

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