Estimating infectiousness throughout SARS-CoV-2 infection course
Terry C. Jones, Guido Biele, Barbara Mühlemann, Talitha Veith, Julia Schneider, Jörn Beheim-Schwarzbach, Tobias Bleicker, Julia Tesch, Marie Luisa Schmidt, Leif Erik Sander, Florian Kurth, Peter Menzel, Rolf Schwarzer, Marta Żuchowski, Jörg Hofmann, Andi Krumbholz, Angela Stein, Anke Edelmann, Victor M. Corman, Christian Drosten
Abstract
Correlates of infectiousness The role that individuals with asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 have in transmission of the virus is not well understood. Jones et al. investigated viral load in patients, comparing those showing few, if any, symptoms with hospitalized cases. Approximately 400,000 individuals, mostly from Berlin, were tested from February 2020 to March 2021 and about 6% tested positive. Of the 25,381 positive subjects, about 8% showed very high viral loads. People became infectious within 2 days of infection, and in hospitalized individuals, about 4 days elapsed from the start of virus shedding to the time of peak viral load, which occurred 1 to 3 days before the onset of symptoms. Overall, viral load was highly variable, but was about 10-fold higher in persons infected with the B.1.1.7 variant. Children had slightly lower viral loads than adults, although this difference may not be clinically significant. Science , abi5273, this issue p. eabi5273