Why It Matters How Much Virus Is in the Body

New data suggests that viral load might be an important factor for transmission and disease severity

Alexandra Sifferlin
Medium Coronavirus Blog
4 min readAug 11, 2020

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Photo: Waldemar Brandt/Unsplash

Once a virus infects a body, it starts replicating. The amount of virus a person has inside of them — and the amount of virus that person is producing — is what’s referred to as viral load. For many viruses, the higher the…

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Alexandra Sifferlin
Medium Coronavirus Blog

Health and science journalist. Former editor of Medium’s Covid-19 Blog and deputy editor at Elemental. TIME Magazine writer before that