ArticleeLife2021
Quantifying the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectiousness.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
89 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Washing Illness Away: A Systematic Review of the Impact of Nasal Irrigation and Spray on COVID-19.The Laryngoscope · 2025Pooled it
- Trial
- Early intervention with azelastine nasal spray may reduce viral load in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Trial
- Transmission of mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants is favored by relatively prolonged infections due to delayed immunity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Disentangling the drivers of heterogeneity in SARS-CoV-2 transmission from data on viral load and daily contact rates.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Nasal inhalation of antiviral microparticulate powders to target early infection of upper airways.Drug delivery and translational research · 2026Article
- Quantitative relationship between cycle threshold values and infectious influenza virus in patient nasopharyngeal samples.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Integrating viral kinetics and population spread in a one health framework to explain variant-specific epidemic dynamics.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Article
- Multimodal data integration to determine viral and innate immune kinetics in human airway epithelium.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Should public health policy exempt cases with low viral load from isolation during an epidemic?: a modelling study.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Review
- Relating In Vivo Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection Kinetics to Host Infectiousness in Different Age Groups.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2025Article
- A fundamental limit to the effectiveness of traveller screening with molecular tests.Epidemiology and infection · 2025Article
- Viral Dynamic Models During COVID-19: Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic?CPT: pharmacometrics & systems pharmacology · 2025Review
- Post-recovery viral shedding shapes wastewater-based epidemiological inferences.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Interplay Between Viral Shedding, Age, and Symptoms in Individual Infectivity of COVID-19 Breakthrough Infections in Households.Vaccines · 2025Article
- Enhanced testing can substantially improve defense against several types of respiratory virus pandemic.Epidemics · 2025Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The relationship between SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectiousness is poorly known. Using data from a cohort of cases and high-risk contacts, we reconstructed viral load at the time of contact and inferred the probability of infection. The effect of viral load was larger in household contacts than in non-household contacts, with a transmission probability as large as 48% when the viral load was greater than 10
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.