Table 1.

Inclusion criteria for eligibility of studies

Inclusion criteria	Rationale
English speaking publication or English publicly available manuscript (due to accelerated publishing timelines during COVID19, epub manuscripts, available ahead of publication were included as well)
Individual data (or mean/SD) of viral RNA load or/and time to clearance of infection is reported	Needed to provide coherent summary measures
Clinical severity per subject (if diverse patient population) or whole patient population is reported	Needed for stratification
Median age for patient population or per subject is reported	Needed for stratification
SARS-CoV-2 detection was performed by RT-PCR with defined thresholds to determine negativity of sample	Ensures to have identical molecular methodology across studies; needed to determine time to clearance from graph if not reported in text
Location of sampling is defined and can be categorized into lower tract respiratory (LRT) specimen, upper respiratory tract (URT) and Faeces	Needed for stratification
Two consecutive measures were obtained to confirm negativity conversion	Ensures quality of measures and reduces risk of false negatives
Time to clearance was either reported from day of symptom onset or day from admission	Needed to have coherent and clinically meaningful Day 0 set across studies
Study is a case series, systematic review, prospective observational or retrospective study	Reduce risk of reporting bias