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According to a British mathematician, all the COVID-19 virus particles spreading death and misery around the world would fit in a single can of Coke.
University of Bath figures calculator Kit Yates discovered that there were around 2 quintillion – or 2 trillion – of SARS-CoV-2 particles in the world at any one time, said Sky News reported.
But due to their tiny size, if you rounded them all up, it would only make ‘a few bites’.
“It’s amazing to think that all of the problems, disruptions, hardships and loss of life that have resulted from this over the past year could be but a few bites,” Yates said.
Describing his infinitesimal calculations, Yates said he used the diameter of the viral particles – at an average of around 100 nanometers, or 100 billionths of a meter – and figured out the volume of the spherical virus.
Even taking into account the telltale spike proteins and the fact that the particles will leave voids when stacked, the total is still less than a single 330 milliliter can of coke, he said.
“When I was asked to calculate the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 in the world for the BBC Radio 4 program ‘More or less’, I confess that I had no idea of the answer,” Yates wrote in The Conversation. .
“My wife suggested it would be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. “Either that or a teaspoon,” she said. “It’s usually one or the other with these types of questions,” he added.
More than 2.35 million people have died from COVID-19 to date and there have been more than 107 million confirmed cases worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In the United States, the death toll is nearly 472,000 and there are about 27.3 million confirmed cases.
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