Abstract
The SARS-CoV-2 virus disproportionately causes serious illness and death in older individuals. In order to have the greatest impact in decreasing the human toll caused by the virus, antiviral treatment should be targeted to older patients. For this, we need a better understanding of the differences in viral dynamics between SARS-CoV-2 infection in younger and older adults. In this study, we use previously published averaged viral titre measurements from the nose and throat of SARS-CoV-2 infection in young and aged cynomolgus macaques to parametrize a viral kinetics model. We find that all viral kinetics parameters differ between young and aged macaques in the nasal passages, but that there are fewer differences in parameter estimates from the throat. We further use our parametrized model to study the antiviral treatment of young and aged animals, finding that early antiviral treatment is more likely to lead to a lengthening of the infection in aged animals, but not in young animals.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has caused widespread illness and death around the world [1]
We examined the differences in viral titre kinetics in the nose and throat of young and aged macaques by estimating best-fit parameters of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) model
We found statistically significant differences in all parameters describing the nasal viral kinetics of young and aged macaques, but noted fewer differences in the throat viral kinetics
Summary
The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has caused widespread illness and death around the world [1]. While it appears that a substantial fraction of people infected with the virus are asymptomatic [2,3], some people develop severe symptoms that lead to respiratory failure [4,5,6]. There are several possible reasons for the increased likelihood of severe disease in older adults. There are a number of co-morbidities associated with severe COVID-19 that become more common with age [11,12]. Mucociliary clearance becomes less effective as people age [13,14], resulting in increased likelihood of infection when exposed to respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2.
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