Deducing the Dose-response Relation for Coronaviruses from COVID-19, SARS and MERS Meta-analysis Results

ABSTRACT

The fundamental dose-response relation is still missing for better evaluating and controlling the transmission risk of COVID-19. A recent study by Chu et al. has indicated that the anticipated probability of viral infection is about 12.8% within 1 m and about 2.6% at further distance through a systematic review and meta-analysis. This important information provides us a unique opportunity to assess the dose-response relation of the viruses, if reasonable exposure dose could be estimated. Here we developed a simple framework to integrate the a priori dose-response relation for SARS-CoV based on mice experiments, and the recent data on infection risk and viral shedding, to shed light on the dose-response relation for human. The developed dose-response relation is an exponential function with a constant k in the range of 6.19x104 to 7.28x105 virus copies. The result mean that the infection risk caused by one virus copy in viral shedding is about 1.5x10-6 to 1.6x10-5. The developed dose-response relation provides a tool to quantify the magnitude of the infection risk.