Nope. The higher the dose you get at any given time, the likelier it is that enough virions will establish footholds in enough cells to overwhelm the local prot

Nope. The higher the dose you get at any given time, the likelier it is that enough virions will establish footholds in enough cells to overwhelm the local protective response and survive to replicate. To be clear, that's not an antibody-mediated immune response, which takes longer. Before then, cells penetrated by virus particles often undergo apoptosis, self-destructing to defend the larger organism by preventing the virus from hijacking the cell's machinery to reproduce itself. Sometimes the virus wins, though. So the more particles you're exposed to, the higher the odds that one or more will establish itself and start making you sick. For more, see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2517702/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2517702/ - but if you don't want that level of detail, you can just think of it as "flattening the curve" on an individual scale, and not really go far wrong. edit: More accurate use of "immune" now that I'm not commenting from a phone with a small screen. Apoptosis isn't initiated by the immune system, but rather within the affected cell itself, and doesn't only occur in response to viral invasion; many types of cellular injury or damage can cause it, including most of the ways that a cell can become precancerous. (Which happens a lot more often than you might think! But most such cells self-destruct before they can give rise to a tumor.)