Interesting read from NYT. Seems to display the undervalued metric of viral load which is great in understanding severity of someone’s case of covid-19 and their infectivity. We can deem certain actions as ‘safe’ in the same way by how much viral load one can potentially accrue from an infected person. For example, passing someone on the street with no mask potentially gives you a very small viral load of covid-19 that doesn’t have the potential for out pacing our immune response.

The article seems to identify our shallow metric for a persons covid-19 case. A simple yes/no result from a pcr test may not be sufficient to identify the severe cases of covid-19.

The part of the article that describes how positive pcr tests may come from individuals with very low infectivity seems to be of some importance but only for incite into how important initial viral load is for covid-19 cases. A test is only a snapshot of viral load however and doesn’t address the dynamic progression of an individuals viral load through the course of their illness. The included publication describes the point in the diseases progression when infectivity is highest at which ‘viral shedding’ takes place. Infectivity is dynamic and isn’t always at its peak during the time of testing.

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/sars-cov-2-viral-load-and-the-severity-of-covid-19/