Viral RNA load as determined by cell culture as a management tool for discharge of SARS-CoV-2 patients from infectious disease wards

By B. La Scola, M. Le Bideau, J. Andreani, V. Hoang, Clio Grimaldier, P. Colson, P. Gautret, Didier Raoult. European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 2020

840 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a preliminary clinical study, we observed that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was effective against SARS-CoV-2 by shortening the duration of viral load in Covid-19 patients. It is of paramount importance to define when a treated patient can be considered as no longer contagious. Correlation between successful isolation of virus in cell culture and Ct value of quantitative RT-PCR targeting E gene suggests that patients with Ct above 33–34 using our RT-PCR system are not contagious and thus can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement for non-hospitalized patients.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1872e18700fdb2807e44bd34a7018343630af9cc

Citations in the corpus

• Amplification-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 with CRISPR-Cas13a and mobile phone microscopy (2020, neutral): “In clinical studies, when viral load drops below a million copies/mL (1,000 copies/ mL), few infectious particles are detected and consequently the risk of transmission is low (La Scola et al., 2020; Quicke et al., 2020; Wölfel et al., 2020).”