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Viral levels in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in a specific town or city could be used to assess whether the epidemic there has passed its peak. A common test for SARS-CoV-2 allows doctors to measure an infected person’s ‘viral load’, an indicator of the amount of virus in their body. James Hay at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues, used modelling to show that the viral loads of a population correlate with the rate of viral spread in that population (J. A. Hay et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/ghfm73; 2020).
Early in an epidemic, the average infected person has been recently exposed to the virus and therefore has a high viral load. Later in the epidemic, the average infected person has had the virus for longer and has a low viral load. As a result, a snapshot of the viral-load distribution in a random sample of a population can reveal whether cases in that population are on the rise or are declining, the researchers say. They add that their method is less susceptible to biases from changing COVID-testing practices than simply counting daily cases. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.
