Viral load is a poor metric. It is higher before major symptoms start (before it moves from UR to lungs), and so it goes down over time. You can be dying of COVID and test negative altogether if you’re fully past the initial stages (though you won’t be contagious, which is arguably the real point of the test). So a) a newer variant will definitely have a higher viral load on average just because people are more likely to be at an earlier stage in the infection cycle, especially if it is more transmissible, b) if a virus theoretically stays in the upper respiratory for the duration of the infection, it’ll have a higher average viral load while being less dangerous (in that sense, they are inversely correlated).

> So a) a newer variant will definitely have a higher viral load on average just because people are more likely to be at an earlier stage in the infection cycle, especially if it is more transmissible

Why would that be? The new variant is several months old already. See e.g. Figure 1A in the report [1]

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...

The increase in viral load is a bit more substantial than 10%... The study [0] shows a 10-100x increase for the median case.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248834v...

Yeah you're right, I'm a week out of date. That is disturbing. Perhaps that means it is actually higher viral load but lower impact per amount of virus?