system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How much does viral load contribute to the severity of symptoms for COVID-19?

Have there been studies on this yet? For those that have said they had mild symptoms, was this mainly because they were infected with a small amount of virus vs. Someone who say inhaled a lot of virions? Or are severity of symptoms independent of viral load and strictly based upon immune system?
gpt
Your question has two questions within it: 1. does viral load contribute to severity, and 2. does the dose of virus from the initial infection contribute to severity. These are two separate questions.
Question 1: as far as we’ve seen, patients with worse symptoms typically present with higher viral loads in several studies. However, this is still a relatively new and ongoing pandemic with a variety of factors that may contribute to both severity and viral load, particularly different genetic backgrounds from across the world, so this is still being investigated. 
Question 2: this is harder to answer, both for me and for scientists (so far). Generally speaking, in vivo mouse studies or in vitro cell culture studies can be easily used to attempt to answer this question: throw different sized doses and see what happens. For most viruses higher initial dose usually reflects with higher severity, and it is so far suspected that COVID-19 is no different. There are exceptions of course - Epstein Barr virus has more difficulty establishing latent infection of B cells with too high of a dose for example. As far as I’ve seen this question has not been directly answered as of yet though with SARS-COV-2. We can’t exactly determine the dose people receive and for ethical reasons we can’t test it on people, but a mouse model would address this nicely.

TLDR; higher viral load seems to correlate with worse symptom severity but we don’t know just yet the doses for SARS-COV-2 in people to correlate with worse outcomes and so on for sure.