ArticleeLife2021
Viral load and contact heterogeneity predict SARS-CoV-2 transmission and super-spreading events.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 137 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
137 citing papers in PubMed.
- Estimating salivary carriage of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in nonsymptomatic people and efficacy of mouthrinse in reducing viral load: A randomized controlled trial.Journal of the American Dental Association (1939) · 2021Trial
- Transmission of mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants is favored by relatively prolonged infections due to delayed immunity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Is it "Time to Eliminate" Time to Elimination of Symptoms as a Primary Trial End Point for Drugs Targeting Respiratory Viruses?The Journal of infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Disentangling the drivers of heterogeneity in SARS-CoV-2 transmission from data on viral load and daily contact rates.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Tracking Dynamics of Superspreading Through Contacts, Exposures, and Transmissions in Edge-Based Network Epidemics.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Data aggregation and mechanistic modeling enable dose-response analysis of SARS-CoV-1 in non-human primates.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Discordant Outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 Exposure in Household Contacts.Clinical immunology communications · 2026Article
- Clinical trial simulation of antiviral drugs.Journal of virology · 2026Review
- Review
- Uncovering heterogeneous intercommunity disease transmission from neutral allele frequency time series.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Quantifying viral pandemic potential from experimental transmission studies.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Changing socioeconomic inequalities in the incidence and case fatality rates of COVID-19 in Germany, March 2020 through May 2022: an ecological study.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Inside-out: modelling the link between Zika virus viral dynamics within hosts and transmission to vectors across host species and virus strains.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Mutation profiling, evolution analysis, molecular dynamics simulation, and functional characterization of Omicron sub-strains.Virus research · 2025Article
- Quantifying viral load and characterizing virus diversity in wildlife samples with target enrichment sequencing.Microbial genomics · 2025Article
- Viral Dynamic Models During COVID-19: Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic?CPT: pharmacometrics & systems pharmacology · 2025Review
- A within-host birth-death and time-dose-response model for Legionnaires' disease.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Endogenous competition and the underrealized reproduction of infectious diseases.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Post-recovery viral shedding shapes wastewater-based epidemiological inferences.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Real-world usage of mass rapid antigen testing for COVID-19 in long-term care facilities and support programmes: results from long-term surveillance in North-Eastern Germany.BMC public health · 2025Article
77 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is difficult to contain because many transmissions occur during pre-symptomatic infection. Unlike influenza, most SARS-CoV-2-infected people do not transmit while a small percentage infect large numbers of people. We designed mathematical models which link observed viral loads with epidemiologic features of each virus, including distribution of transmissions attributed to each infected person and duration between symptom onset in the transmitter and secondarily infected person. We identify that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 or influenza can be highly contagious for less than 1 day, congruent with peak viral load. SARS-CoV-2 super-spreader events occur when an infected person is shedding at a very high viral load and has a high number of exposed contacts. The higher predisposition of SARS-CoV-2 toward super-spreading events cannot be attributed to additional weeks of shedding relative to influenza. Rather, a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 exposes more people within equivalent physical contact networks, likely due to aerosolization.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.