Malik Peiris, Co-Director at HKU-Pasteur, published in The New England Journal Of Medicine on SARS-CoV-2 viral load in upper respiratory specimens of infected patients:
The findings provided in this publication are in concordance with reports that transmission may occur early in the course of infection and suggest that case detection and isolation may require strategies different from those required for the control of SARS-CoV.
How SARS-CoV-2 viral load correlates with culturable virus needs to be determined. Identification of patients with few or no symptoms and with modest levels of detectable viral RNA in the oropharynx for at least 5 days suggests that we need better data to determine transmission dynamics and inform our screening practices.
