Fig. 5

Averaged trajectories obtained from the fitted mechanistic model. In this plot, we show the average trajectory predicted for each study (coloured lines), generated using the median value used for the initial viral load at t=0 in each case. We also show the average trajectory across all the studies, indicated by the black line. The dark grey shaded area indicates the 95% credible interval for this average trajectory. The light grey area accounts for the variation observed around the average trajectory (generated using samples from σ, as defined in in Eq. 8, and calculating the 95% prediction interval for the population-level dynamics). The fit to data from Study 3 is not shown, as this study only contained one patient, which means one cannot distinguish between study- and patient-specific random effects. The opaque black circles are the data points from the 16 studies used to fit the model. For illustrative purposes, viral samples that were negative for the virus are set to 1 viral copy per ml (i.e. 0 on the log-scale). The results from the mechanistic model presented here were obtained using 1500 samples from the posterior distribution, with the median trajectories plotted