Fully vaccinated people who come into contact with a positive COVID-19 case could soon be able to return to daily life without self-isolating for a full 14-day period.

The tentative plan is to allow fully vaccinated people to exit self-isolation after a five-day period and a negative PCR test result, with another swab test being required some days later.

Details are, however, still being ironed out and that five-day period – implemented during a pilot study involving Mater Dei Hospital frontliners – could be modified when the measure is communicated to the public.

The plans were unveiled by Health Minister Chris Fearne in an interview with Times of Malta on Friday, hours before the Malta Chamber made a public plea for quarantine rules to be eased for fully vaccinated people.

“If we really believe that the COVID-19 vaccines break the chain of contagion, we need to be pragmatic and should not be placing fully vaccinated secondary contacts in quarantine,” chamber president Marisa Xuereb argued.

Under current rules, fully vaccinated people identified as a close contact of a positive virus case must spend a full 14-day period in self-isolation.

“On one hand, employers are being asked to encourage employees to get vaccinated,while, on the other, the authorities are not treating fully vaccinated employees any differently from those who are still refusing to be vaccinated,” Xuereb noted.

Health Minister Chris Fearne said details about the plan were still being ironed out.

Fearne said the rules will be eased if the number of COVID-19 patients receiving hospital treatment remains low for the next week or so.

“We still need to wait a few days because the number of hospitalisations usually increases two or three weeks after a rise in community cases,” he said.

We should know that by the end of the month,” Fearne added.

Vaccination and virus transmission

Malta is one of the world’s most vaccinated countries, with 82 per cent of adults fully vaccinated. As of yesterday, there were 19 patients in hospital out of 2,497 active virus cases.

While a fully vaccinated person can still be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and transmit it to others, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that they are much less likely to do so than unvaccinated people.

A study that looked at 365,000 households in the UK found that transmission was reduced by 40-50 per cent in cases when the infected person was vaccinated at least 21 days before testing positive.

Other studies also found strong evidence that vaccination reduced both the rate of COVID infection as well as transmission to household contacts.

However, that research is based on data collected before the emergence of the highly contagious Delta virus variant that is spreading across the world and data published by Israel’s health ministry early in July indicated that vaccines are less likely to prevent transmission of the Delta variant, though they continue to provide very high protection against serious illness.

Malta’s plans to ease self-isolation rules follow similar measures introduced by other countries such as the US, the UK and Germany, which have all eased rules for fully vaccinated people who come into contact with positive virus cases.