Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 747

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 122 of the 122 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: A Review of Viral, Host, and Environmental Factors

Open access
Meyerowitz, Eric A., Richterman, Aaron, Gandhi, Rajesh T., Sax, Paul E.·2021·Annals of Internal Medicine

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the etiologic agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has spread globally in a few short months. Substantial evidence now supports preliminary conclusions about transmission that can inform rational, evidence-based policies and reduce misinformation on this critical topic. This article presents a comprehensive review of the evidence on transmission of this virus. Although several experimental studies have cultured live virus from aerosols and surfaces hours after inoculation, the real-world studies that detect viral RNA in the environment report very low levels, and few have isolated viable virus. Strong evidence from case and cluster reports indicates that respiratory transmission is dominant, with proximity and ventilation being key determinants of transmission risk. In the few cases where direct contact or fomite transmission is presumed, respiratory transmission has not been completely excluded. Infectiousness peaks around a day before symptom onset and declines within a week of symptom onset, and no late linked transmissions (after a patient has had symptoms for about a week) have been documented. The virus has heterogeneous transmission dynamics: Most persons do not transmit virus, whereas some cause many secondary cases in transmission clusters called "superspreading events." Evidence-based policies and practices should incorporate the accumulating knowledge about transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to help educate the public and slow the spread of this virus.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7326/m20-5008

Cites

122 of 122 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 122 references

Cited by

See all 747

Metadata

Authors
Meyerowitz, E. A., Richterman, A., Gandhi, R. T., & Sax, P. E.
Venue
Annals of Internal Medicine
Published
2021-01
Volume
174
Issue
1
Pages
69-79
ISSN
  • 0003-4819 (ISSN-L)
  • 1539-3704
OpenAlex
W3087467629
Cited by
747
References
122
FWCI
76.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: A Review of Viral, Host, and Environmental Factors. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.7326/m20-5008
The paper
Meyerowitz, E. A., Richterman, A., Gandhi, R. T., & Sax, P. E. (2021). Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: A Review of Viral, Host, and Environmental Factors. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/m20-5008

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.