At this point in the pandemic, it has become more difficult for epidemiologists to say with certainty whether one variant reaches a higher viral load or how that viral load correlates with infectiousness, notes Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That is because so many people have now been infected with COVID or received different numbers of vaccine doses, meaning that their immune systems respond differently to the newer variant. “It’s too complicated to say one variant will produce a higher viral load,” Sethi says.
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