Journal
VIRUS RESEARCH
Volume 296, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.virusres.2021.198340
Keywords
SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; Viral load; Clinical outcomes; Ct values
Categories
Funding
- Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation (FAPERJ)
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Understanding viral load is crucial for formulating strategies for the treatment and control of COVID-19. Identification of patients with high viral loads can help understand risk factors. However, using Ct values alone as indicators of viral load may lead to misinterpretation, emphasizing the importance of normalization in evaluating viral load.
Knowledge of viral load is essential to formulate strategies for antiviral treatment, vaccination, and epidemio-logical control of COVID-19. Moreover, identification of patients with high viral loads can also be useful to understand risk factors such as age, comorbidities, severity of symptoms and hypoxia, to decide on the need for hospitalization. Several ongoing studies are analyzing viral load in different types of samples and evaluating its relationship with clinical outcomes and viral transmission pathways. However, in a great number of emerging studies, cycle threshold (Ct) values alone are often used as viral load indicators, which may be a mistake. In this study, we compared tracheal aspirate with nasopharyngeal swab samples obtained from critically ill COVID-19 patients and here we report how the raw Ct can lead to misinterpretation of results. Furthermore, based on analysis of nasopharyngeal swab samples we propose a method to reduce evaluation errors that could occur from using raw Ct data. Based on these findings, we show the impact that normalization of Ct values has on inter-pretation of SARS-CoV-2 viral load from different biological samples.
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