Determining the period of communicability of SARS-CoV-2: A rapid review of the literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction How long individuals may transmit virus after infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is unclear. Understanding the communicability period of SARS-CoV-2 is important to inform the period of isolation required to prevent nosocomial and community spread. The objective of this study was to identify the reported communicable period of SARS-CoV-2, based on a rapid review of existing literature. Methods Studies reporting empirical data on the period of communicability of SARS-CoV-2 through investigations of duration of communicability based on in-person contact (“contact transmission”), isolation and culture of virus (“viral isolation”), and viral shedding by detection of nucleic acids by RT-PCR (“viral shedding”) were identified through searches of peer-reviewed and pre-print health sciences literature databases (Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Google Scholar, medRxiv and arXiv) and the grey literature. Articles were screened for relevance, then data were extracted, analyzed, and synthesized. Results Out of the 165 studies included for qualitative analysis, one study investigated contact transmission, three investigated viral isolation, 144 investigated viral shedding, and 17 studies focused on both viral shedding and viral isolation. The median length of time until viral clearance across all viral isolation studies was nine days; however, the maximum identified duration was 32 days. Studies with data on both viral isolation and viral shedding showed a prolonged maximum time until viral clearance for viral shedding (9 days vs 24 days). Discussion Findings from this review support a minimum 10-day period of isolation; however, additional observation should be considered for individuals being released into high-risk settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".