Scientists calculate how much all flying Covid particles weigh in the world

A group of researchers has calculated that each infected individual carries between 10 billion and 100 billion of individual particles of SARS-CoV-2 at the height of your infection. This means that all of the viruses currently infecting people around the world, who were around 1 million to 10 million infections during the pandemic, have a collective mass of between 100 grams and 10 kilos.

The method used to calculate the amount of virus each person can carry was previous measurements caught in overalls Rhesus sensitive organs such as the lungs, tonsils, lymph nodes and the digestive system.

Then they multiplied the number of viral particles present per gram of tissue in the monos rhesus with the mass of human tissues, thus estimate the number of particles virus.

The main author of the study, Ron milo, professor in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel, and co-lead author Ron Shipper, a doctoral student in Milo’s lab, explained to Live Science What “In a larger historical context, an atomic bomb has less than 100kg of fissile material ”.

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“Here we are talking about a mass super small viruses, and they cause ravaged in the world, ”they added.

The researchers also calculated how many mutations the virus would accumulate, on average, during an infection of only one person and also in the general population: During infection in a single host, the virus has accumulated around 0.1 to a mutation throughout its genome.

In the study, they stated that since there is 4 to 5 days time between infections, “the virus would accumulate around three transfers per month, which is consistent with the known rate of evolution of SARS-CoV-2 ″.

As if that weren’t enough, they also found great variation in the number of viral particles among infected humans. As reported Scientific alert, may differ by five to six orders of magnitude, which means that some infected people may have millions of times more of these particles than others.

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“We know that people low viral load to have less chances infect others, ”Milo and Sender concluded.