3 ms·
you 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 con
by clairity 6y ago
you 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'.