Scientists recently conducted the first human trial of infecting people with the coronavirus and found that COVID-19 symptoms might not be an indication of viral shedding.
What they found: On the surface, the study — published by the scientific journal Nature Medicine — found exactly how little of the coronavirus is needed to infect someone.
Symptoms: The researchers also found that there was no connection between viral shedding and COVID-19 symptoms, per Reuters.
- The researchers said that COVID-19 symptoms didn’t indicate viral shedding.
- The study found that “among the 18 participants that caught COVID-19, the severity of symptoms, or whether they developed symptoms at all, had nothing to do with the viral load in their airways,” Reuters reported.
What they said: “There was no correlation between the amount of viral shedding … and symptom score,” the researchers said in the paper, according to Reuters.
The bigger picture: A study published back in January in the journal Cell identified four factors that could increase your chances of long COVID-19 symptoms.
- One of those factors was the viral load, or the number of viral droplets in one’s blood, as I wrote for the Deseret News.