| SvennoJ said: Wouldn't the amount you inhale simply speed up the incubation time? |
Dr Edward Parker, Research Fellow in Systems Biology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said:
“After we are infected with a virus, it replicates in our body’s cells. The total amount of virus a person has inside them is referred to as their ‘viral load’. For COVID-19, early reports from China suggest that the viral load is higher in patients with more severe disease, which is also the case for Sars and influenza.
“The amount of virus we are exposed to at the start of an infection is referred to as the ‘infectious dose’. For influenza, we know that that initial exposure to more virus – or a higher infectious dose – appears to increase the chance of infection and illness. Studies in mice have also shown that repeated exposure to low doses may be just as infectious as a single high dose.
“So all in all, it is crucial for us to limit all possible exposures to COVID-19, whether these are to highly symptomatic individuals coughing up large quantities of virus or to asymptomatic individuals shedding small quantities. And if we are feeling unwell, we need to observe strict self-isolation measures to limit our chance of infecting others.”
Prof Wendy Barclay, Action Medical Research Chair Virology, and Head of Department of Infectious Disease, Imperial College London, said:
“In general with respiratory viruses, the outcome of infection – whether you get severely ill or only get a mild cold – can sometimes be determined by how much virus actually got into your body and started the infection off. It’s all about the size of the armies on each side of the battle, a very large virus army is difficult for our immune systems army to fight off.
“So standing further away from someone when they breathe or cough out virus likely means fewer virus particles reach you and then you get infected with a lower dose and get less ill. Doctors who have to get very close to patients to take samples from them or to intubate them are at higher risk so need to wear masks.
“The fewer people in the room, the less likely it is than one person is coughing or breathing out infectious virus at any one time, so mixing with as few people as possible is the safest way.
Prof Jonathan Ball, Professor of Molecular Virology, University of Nottingham, said:
“We know that the likelihood of virus transmission increases with duration and frequency of exposure of an uninfected individual with someone infected with the virus. We also suspect that the amount of virus that an infected individual is producing – sometimes referred to as the viral load – and potentially shedding, will also impact on transmission; the higher the viral load the more infectious someone is likely to be.
“It is also possible that individuals with pneumonia who have a higher viral load might develop more serious disease, but disease development is complex and no doubt many factors will have an impact.”
Professor Willem van Schaik, Professor in Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham, said:
“The minimal infective dose is defined as the lowest number of viral particles that cause an infection in 50% of individuals (or ‘the average person’). For many bacterial and viral pathogens we have a general idea of the minimal infective dose but because SARS-CoV-2 is a new pathogen we lack data. For SARS, the infective dose in mouse models was only a few hundred viral particles. It thus seems likely that we need to breathe in something like a few hundred or thousands of SARS-CoV-2 particles to develop symptoms. This would be a relatively low infective dose and could explain why the virus is spreading relatively efficiently.
“On the basis of previous work on SARS and MERS coronaviruses, we know that exposure to higher doses are associated with a worse outcome and this may be likely in the case of Covid-19 as well. This means that health care workers that care for Covid-19 patients are at a particularly high risk as they are more likely to be exposed to a higher number of viral particles, particularly when there is a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) as is reported in some UK hospitals
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I am obviously not suggesting we start giving the virus to everyone. But one has to wonder if at one point this becomes too tedious to control and if we're all going to get the infection sooner or later, might as well get it through the lab under controlled measures making sure we get the smallest dose possible to a set number of people at known intervals. The hospitals would be pre-alerted to who received the virus and ready to help those are unfortunate enough to develop severe symptoms. Instead of wondering which patients with respiratory symptoms have COVID and which ones have the flu/bacterial pneumonia/a heart problem etc.
This is obviously a hypothetical scenario on a video games forum so don't take it too seriously.
Last edited by LurkerJ - on 07 April 2020
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