Researchers administered a dose of the Corona virus to a group of volunteers who contracted Covid-19 disease, with the aim of knowing what happens in the infected body from the first moments until recovery.
The researchers took healthy people, who had not previously been infected with the virus, and they numbered 34 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 years, according to a report by the newspaper “Jerusalem Post“.
The study began with the introduction of nasal drops containing coronavirus particles to healthy volunteers who were free of antibodies.
The droplets contained the average amount of virus particles that could be found in the aerosols of droplets emitted from the nose of an early-stage coronavirus patient.
After exposure to the virus, 18 volunteers became ill, of whom 16 developed mild to moderate symptoms of the disease (sore throat, headache, muscle and joint aches, fatigue and fever).
About a third of the volunteers (13) lost their sense of smell, but ten had it restored within three months of infection, and three had been experiencing symptoms for more than three months.
In turn, Dr. Christopher Chu, the lead researcher on the study, said that the results of the preliminary study show cases of mild to moderate injuries.
Among the 18 volunteers who became infected, the researchers found that the virus could be detected in the throat as early as 40 hours after initial exposure, and in the nose 58 hours after infection.
The researchers also found that the viral load in infected people peaked on the fifth day after exposure. The viral presence in the throat is usually lower than that in the nose of sick volunteers.
Another interesting finding the researchers reported was that all participants had quite similar levels of viral load, regardless of the severity of symptoms they experienced.
At what point do rapid tests become reliable?
The researchers, in their experiment, also tested the ability to detect rapid antigen tests throughout the disease stages. They concluded that these tests were able to reliably detect the virus throughout the time of illness, although they were slightly less sensitive at the beginning and at the end, when the viral load is lower.
In other words, rapid tests were less likely to produce a positive result when virus levels were lower, which means that at the beginning and end of the disease they may give a false negative result.
It is noteworthy that despite the increase in the vaccination rate, the Corona virus has caused the death of at least 5,214,847 people in the world since the World Health Organization office in China reported the emergence of the disease at the end of December 2019.