As far as I can tell, this paper from Germany actually took the time to detect live virus vs PCR positive: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20

As far as I can tell, this paper from Germany actually took the time to detect live virus vs PCR positive: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v... They found that, for all patients in the small study (N=16), none tested positive for infectious virus after day 8 post-onset, despite testing positive for the virus in RNA over 2 weeks after illness onset. This, to me, is encouraging.