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My model is: - A virion has to infect a cell before it becomes inactivated. It could encounter something in the intercellular space or extracellular matrix wh
by 01100011 6y ago
My model is:
- A virion has to infect a cell before it becomes inactivated. It could encounter something in the intercellular space or extracellular matrix which renders it inactive, or it may be exposed to something in the environment for long enough to become inactive, like a random O3 molecule or hydroxy radical perhaps.
- The virion can successfully enter a cell but something can happen to interfere with replication, like a mutation event or some localized cell state, like the cell is preparing for mitosis, apoptosis, etc.
- The virion successfully enters a cell but the cell is destroyed by the immune system before significant quantities of virus are produced.
I'm just guessing, because I don't have much more than a basic understanding of microbiology. I think it is definitely possible to become infected via a single virion though.
- chadcmulligan 6y agoThats been my assumption - its a race between the virus finding the right spot that allows access to the cell and something else destroying it. Either the corona virus needs a very specific spot to allow access, or there's a number of steps that have to occur before a successful infection. Either case requires a lot of virus particle to infect for the probabilities to be in its favour.
- clairity 6y agoyou were doing pretty well until that last sentence. you enumerated some of the many difficulties a virion has of infecting you, and then came to a puzzling conclusion that doesn't follow at all from the previous statements. the chance of one virion in the environment infecting you is essentially zero, for the reasons you state as well as many others. you need to accumulate billions of chances for 'essentially zero' to reach a 'miniscule chance', and many orders of magnitude more to reach 'maybe', 'probably', and 'definitely'. infection is unlikely if you don't love sitting directly in the respiratory exhaust of strangers all day.
- 01100011 6y agoMy point is that it is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Rare events sometimes happen. With no background in biology, I can't say what the actual probability is. Is the chance of a single virion infecting a cell 1 in a sextillion, or only 1 in a million? In either case, it is still possible, as far as I understand the definition of the word 'possible'.