What sets delta apart, experts say, is how much virus is produced by those who are infected — a measure known as viral load.
of the coronavirus, now the most common strain circulating in the United States, is causing cases of Covid-19 to surge across the country. Key to the variant's dominance is its supercharged transmissibility, driven in part by how the mutated virus behaves in the body after infection.
that has yet to be peer-reviewed found that people infected with the delta variant had viral loads that were up to 1,260 times higher than the viral loads of individuals infected with the original strain that circulated in 2020. "It's an inverse relationship, so a low Ct means there's a lot of virus and you're able to get a positive result earlier in the test," Olsen said.
But people shouldn't infer infectiousness from a Ct value, said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician and an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. "So many things vary and can impact a Ct value, so all we can safely say is that it's a snapshot in time," Butler-Wu said.
The Chinese researchers who studied viral loads in people infected with the delta variant also observed that the incubation period with delta patients was shorter compared to the original strain. With previous variants, the virus was detectable in infected individuals an average of six days after exposure, but with the delta variant, that window was shortened to four days.
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