When patients arrive in emergency departments and hospitals with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, it’s critical to isolate them to avoid the potential spread of infection, but keeping patients isolated longer than needed could delay patient care, take up hospital beds needed for other patients, and unnecessarily use up personal protective equipment. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has now created a tool to guide frontline clinicians through diagnostic evaluations of such patients so that they’ll know when it’s safe to discontinue precautions. The tool was developed and validated in a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.