I am high-risk, and PCR tests are imperfect, so a year ago I set about trying to answer the question: How long would a quarantine have to last to truly guarante

I am high-risk, and PCR tests are imperfect, so a year ago I set about trying to answer the question: How long would a quarantine have to last to truly guarantee safety? Or at least, guarantee safety within an acceptable margin of error (like a .001% risk)? I looked at research papers from the beginning of the pandemic. I don't remember the exact statistics, but it was something like: 95% of cases became positive within 14 days. But then a few outlier ones became positive through day 22. And then there were a very few freak cases that turned positive after 30 days or so. Even if you threw out the super-outliers after day 22, you're still left with about 5% of cases showing up in week 3. I believe some Asian countries are requiring 3 week quarantines for this reason. However, in the US, we've pushed quarantine to 10 days, and most recently 5 days (?!?!). And there's still the issue of asymptomatic cases. A person could get asymptomatically ill on Day 22, and maybe a PCR test would still fail. In that case, we'd have to wait 10 days for their symptoms to resolve. So we're at least 32 days out for a true "quarantine." Round it up to 40 for good measure and we're back to where we started in the middle ages -- the word "quarantine" comes from the word for "forty," meaning 40 days quarantine to prevent the Black Death from spreading. I don't know how likely the scenario is of a person turning positive on day 22, and then a PCR test failing to pick it up. The problem is, nobody seems to know that, because the research showing how UNsafe we are (potentially) is strongly disincentivized. The CDC keeps reducing quarantine time in a naked tribute to business interests. And yes, I use the word "tribute" intentionally. I volunteer as Tribute....for The Economy. Omicron in general tends to have a shorter incubation period, but obviously not always. From what I glean from this article, it appears one individual got sick 17 days after starting the quarantine process -- again, well within the 22 day incubation period of the original sars-cov-2. It would be great to know now what the outer incubation period is of Delta and Omicron, but we don't, because it's not in anyone's interest for us to know. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair