eLife Assessment: Stratification of viral shedding patterns in saliva of COVID-19 patients

This important work attempts to understand observed variability in oral shedding of SARS-CoV-2 and suggests that routine clinical factors are not determinative.The evidence supporting the conclusion is solid though the limited clinical heterogeneity of the included cohorts, the lack of COVID vaccination, and the absence of comprehensive viral load data for model training, makes the results difficult to generalize to contemporaneous COVID-19 conditions.This study may be of interest to virologists, public health officials and clinicians.