Department of Pathology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA 02215, USA
 Research Article   
								
																The Coviral Portal: Multi-Cohort Viral Loads and Antigen-Test Virtual Trials for COVID-19 
																Author(s): Alexandra Morgan, Elisa Contreras, Michie Yasuda, Sanjucta Dutta, Donald Hamel, Tarini Shankar, Diane Balallo, Stefan Riedel, James E. Kirby, Phyllis J Kanki and Ramy Arnaout*             
								
																
						 Objective: Regulatory approval of new  over-the-counter tests for infectious agents such as SARS-CoV-2 has  historically required that clinical trials  include diverse groups  of specific patient  populations, making the approval  process slow and expensive. Showing  that populations do not differ in their  viral loads the key factor  determining test performance could expedite the evaluation of new tests.
Materials and methods: We annotated 46,726 RT-qPCR-positive SARS-CoV-2 viral loads with demographics and  health status, evaluated the performance of two commercially available antigen tests over a wide range of viral loads,  and created an open-access web portal allowing  comparisons of viral-load distributions across patient  groups and application of  antigen-test performance characteristics.
Results: In several c.. View more»