>If the virus population doubles every second then the person who swallowed 30 virus particles will be at 300,000 in just 14 seconds
That was also my intuitive response at the beginning of the pandemic. I assume one virus was plenty due to exponential growth. Having read every article I could in the past year, it's extremely rare to run across any details but:
1. I've read that scientists believe a coronavirus takes hundreds of viruses to successfully infect us. Not, for example, several dozen like some other viruses.
2. Next obvious question to me is, is this because one has to land on a lucky spot on the body and the rest somehow die before they can reproduce (so it's statistical odds that one virus gets the conditions it needs just like one sperm makes it to the egg)? Or can the body fight off a dozen or two dozen covid19 viruses so quickly that they never take hold? I only see two possibilities here.
3. If it is the latter, an answer I can't find anywhere, why did we need to waste so much time developing a vaccine? Wouldn't it be equally efficacious to introduce one virus to the body on day one, four on day two, and so on until immunity is achieved? Evidence of this possibility would be mixed in with the population they believe are asymptomatic, so unless researchers look for this they won't find it. (Basically a natural immunity hypothesis - based on repeated low viral count exposure.)
A virus that doubled in a second would be perceived as a swarm that dissolved people before our eyes as it quickly ate the biomass of the planet. Think 2^86400 in one day. Fortunately it would need faster than light travel to keep replicating at that rate for long.
Anything that keeps replicating exponentially will eventually have its growth limited by the speed of light, because the amount of space you can reach while traveling at a bounded speed only grows polynomially fast. Because the formula for the volume of a sphere is cubic. You’ll run out of space and the things in the inside of the ball won’t have room to replicate.
> If it is the latter, an answer I can't find anywhere, why did we need to waste so much time developing a vaccine? Wouldn't it be equally efficacious to introduce one virus to the body on day one, four on day two, and so on until immunity is achieved?
Introducing the virus like this, you’ve created a live virus vaccine. The work involved in creating and testing such a vaccine isn’t really any less than creating the vaccines we did make. You still have to develop technology to grow the virus and distribute exactly the right quantity. Moreover, the risk of complications is far greater if someone fails to fight off the small viral load infection.
The vaccines such as Moderna only took a week or two to prototype in January 2020. The entire rest of the time was scaling up production and running tests to prove it worked in the population. We could have skipped running the trials and deployed the untested vaccine instead. A lot of lives would have been saved but no way to know that without doing the trials, I suppose.
What you are referring to is the viral load. How much does it take to make you really ill. It matters because your body can fight a few dozen virus cells more readily that it can a few thousand. Sure it can make more antibodies but they take time, time the virus has to replicate, so now you need more antibodies, and yiu aren't exactly sure which ones work.
Sort of. Variolation also involved intentionally inoculating with a naturally occurring less deadly strain. Also, introducing intentional Covid infections in a naive population would likely infect many contacts of the inoculated patients before they got inoculated, which would defeat the purpose.
to your last question—when we develop a vaccine or treatment, it’s about making sure as many people as possible get the minimum degree of protection with the least amount of risk. giving live virus is a tremendous risk, even if you found a way to just give one particle at a time effectively.
That was also my intuitive response at the beginning of the pandemic. I assume one virus was plenty due to exponential growth. Having read every article I could in the past year, it's extremely rare to run across any details but:
1. I've read that scientists believe a coronavirus takes hundreds of viruses to successfully infect us. Not, for example, several dozen like some other viruses.
2. Next obvious question to me is, is this because one has to land on a lucky spot on the body and the rest somehow die before they can reproduce (so it's statistical odds that one virus gets the conditions it needs just like one sperm makes it to the egg)? Or can the body fight off a dozen or two dozen covid19 viruses so quickly that they never take hold? I only see two possibilities here.
3. If it is the latter, an answer I can't find anywhere, why did we need to waste so much time developing a vaccine? Wouldn't it be equally efficacious to introduce one virus to the body on day one, four on day two, and so on until immunity is achieved? Evidence of this possibility would be mixed in with the population they believe are asymptomatic, so unless researchers look for this they won't find it. (Basically a natural immunity hypothesis - based on repeated low viral count exposure.)