Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35679278›Full record

ArticlePloS one2022

Finding the infectious dose for COVID-19 by applying an airborne-transmission model to superspreader events.

Mara Prentiss, Arthur Chu, Karl K Berggren

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
25citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from 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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

25 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Virus-Mediated Self-Assembly of Functional Cyclodextrins for Antiviral Inhibition.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026
    Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Article
  17. Article
  18. Article
  19. Article
  20. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Mara PrentissDepartment of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.ORCID 0000-0001-7199-8945
Arthur ChuQVT Family Office, New York, NY, United States of America.
Karl K BerggrenDepartment of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

We probed the transmission of COVID-19 by applying an airborne transmission model to five well-documented case studies-a Washington state church choir, a Korean call center, a Korean exercise class, and two different Chinese bus trips. For all events the likely index patients were pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic, which is when infective patients are most likely to interact with large groups of people. Applying the model to those events yields results that suggest the following: (1) transmission was airborne; (2) superspreading events do not require an index patient with an unusually high viral load; (3) the viral loads for all of the index patients were of the same order of magnitude and consistent with experimentally measured values for patients at the onset of symptoms, even though viral loads across the population vary by a factor of >108. In particular we used a Wells-Riley exposure model to calculate q, the total average number of infectious quanta inhaled by a person at the event. Given the q value for each event, the simple airborne transmission model was used to determined Sq, the rate at which the index patient exhaled infectious quanta and N0, the characteristic number of COVID-19 virions needed to induce infection. Despite the uncertainties in the values of some parameters of the superspreading events, all five events yielded (N0∼300-2,000 virions), which is similar to published values for influenza. Finally, this work describes the conditions under which similar methods can provide actionable information on the transmission of other viruses.

Indexed as

COVID-19Influenza, HumanExhalationHumansSerologic TestsViral Load

Identifiers

PMID35679278
PMCPMC9182663

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.