For those that may need a little refresher on what a 'viron' is.


[link to www.virology.ws (secure)]


Virons, stability in the environment as surface contaminants...


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8. How stable and infectious is the virion on surfaces?
To understand how SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted, it is vitally important to characterize the stability of infectious virions on different types of surfaces like cardboard, plastics, and various metals. This is a very active area of current research.

However, there are significant caveats associated with viral stability measurements. The measured stability depends on the quantity measured, for example, one can measure either infectious virions or viral RNA copies. The number of infectious virions is typically much lower than inferred from measurements of the viral genome (Woelfel et al., 2020). SARS-CoV-2 RNA has been detected on various surfaces several weeks after they were last touched (Moriarty et al., 2020), but infectiousness appears to degrade more quickly than RNA.

When researchers measured the stability of infectious virions on surfaces, the numbers depended greatly on the type of surface and the medium carrying the virus, with the stability on plastic being much greater than on copper or steel, for example. Viral stability is also known to depend strongly on temperature and humidity (Chin et al., 2020). Therefore calculating the probability of human infection from exposure to contaminated surfaces is a complex task for which sufficient data is not yet available.

As such, caution and protective measures should be taken. To gain some intuition for the importance of surface transmission, we consider an undiagnosed infectious person who touches surfaces tens of times during their infectious period. Prior to lockdown, these public surfaces will subsequently be touched by hundreds of other people. From the basic reproduction number R0 ≈ 2–4 we can infer that not everyone touching those surfaces will be infected. More detailed bounds on the risk of infection from touching surfaces urgently awaits study.

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And now for the killer little tidbit that hitb my ears last night.

BURST SIZE.


Now - when a person is infected with say Influenza, we have a stable burst size - what this means is that we know how many copies of the original infection are made inside each penetrated cell before 'burst' occours and they leave the host to go travel out themselves.


And as much as I hate to say it, but our very own Wordsworth seeded the idea back in 2020 for Mrs Doom to go off and get some investigations done. **

SARSCOV2 has RANDOM burst size. And that is absolutely flooring the researchers. Sometimes it makes 1500 /2000 like HIV. Sometimes it makes 600 - 800 like Influenza.

And others it makes between 30 and 40 THOUSAND ala SIV when infecting Macaque T cells.


And there is the answer in part as to why some people are falling down dead after a random sniffle that runs away from them. The virus has inbuilt ability to swap and change its burst size to suit the environment.


And that made mrs Doom swear something awful.




** Wordsworth kept saying 'but why' (and that is a great place to start in any investigation) and the 'why' was bugging the ever living shit out of the good lady wife.