AI Article Synopsis

  • - The review explores the unclear relationship between the dose of SARS-CoV-2, the resultant infection, and the severity of COVID-19 outcomes, highlighting gaps in current research.
  • - Host factors like age, sex, and pre-existing health conditions significantly affect COVID-19 severity in humans, while animal models often show milder symptoms despite varying doses.
  • - The article calls for improved study designs in both animal and human research to better understand the impact of viral dose on disease severity, as current findings are inconsistent.

Article Abstract

The relationship between severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) dose, infection, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outcomes remains poorly understood. This review summarizes the existing literature regarding this issue, identifies gaps in current knowledge, and suggests opportunities for future research. In humans, host characteristics, including age, sex, comorbidities, smoking, and pregnancy, are associated with severe COVID-19. Similarly, in animals, host factors are strong determinants of disease severity, although most animal infection models manifest clinically with mild to moderate respiratory disease. The influence of variants of concern as it relates to infectious dose, consequence of overall pathogenicity, and disease outcome in dose-response remains unknown. Epidemiologic data suggest a dose-response relationship for infection contrasting with limited and inconsistent surrogate-based evidence between dose and disease severity. Recommendations include the design of future infection studies in animal models to investigate inoculating dose on outcomes and the use of better proxies for dose in human epidemiology studies.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8524637PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab903DOI Listing

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