Upper Respiratory Tract Levels of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 RNA and Duration of Viral RNA Shedding Do Not Differ Between Patients With Mild and Severe/Critical Coronavirus Disease 2019 yilmaz2020upper
The authors reported longitudinal viral RNA loads from the nasopharynx/oropharynx in patients with mild and severe/critical coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). They also investigated whether the duration of symptoms correlated with the duration of viral RNA shedding. A total of 56 patients were included.
Analytes
oropharyngealswab_SARSCoV2
The author collected serial upper respiratory tract samples (one nasopharyngeal swab and one oropharyngeal swab were put in a single collection tube with 1 mL of transport medium) for real-time PCR of SARS-CoV-2 RNA for all patients.
Fitted by censored maximum likelihood. The red line is the median individual; the shaded region is the full range of a simulated cohort drawn from the fitted population, so it shows what simulating from this dataset would produce rather than a confidence interval, with dashed lines at the central 95%. Open triangles are non-detects, drawn at the censoring limit and entering the fit as "below this value" rather than being dropped. See the modelling methods for what these estimates do and do not support.