SARS-CoV-2-RNA viremia is a robust marker of critical illness in COVID-19

SARS-CoV-2-RNA viremia is a robust marker of critical illness in COVID-19

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By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDSep 1 2020

The global pandemic of COVID-19 continues to cause thousands of deaths and many hundreds of thousands of new infections every day. New methods are urgently needed to identify severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections and manage them better, including developing criteria for hospitalization.

A new study by a large team of Spanish researchers and published on the preprint server medRxiv* in August 2020 reports that the presence of viral RNA in the blood is a useful marker of impending acute disease and can help triage COVID-19 disease patients who will require hospital care.