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Colored electron microscope image of Sars-CoV-2
Photo: AFP
The Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus has changed our lives.
A pandemic of the century, a natural disaster, a nightmare for all those who are seriously ill, have lost family members or friends to Covid-19.
No giant wave of a tsunami, no erupting volcano, no shaking earth had these far-reaching consequences: This virus is just a tiny thing, not visible to the naked eye, that is not even alive.
If you were to collect all the coronaviruses that currently exist in the world, they would not even fill a single can of Coke.
The mathematician Kit Yates from the University of Bath has now calculated.
His calculation makes it clear that with Sars-CoV-2 you are dealing with very small and very large numbers at the same time, namely the following:
The size of Sars-CoV-2
The number of viruses in an infected human
The number of those infected
A single coronavirus only measures between 60 and 140 nanometers in diameter.
A nanometer corresponds to a millionth of a millimeter.
Yates reckons with an average size of 100 nanometers.
When people become infected with the coronavirus, the pathogen multiplies in the body by invading cells and using their machinery to make copies of the virus.
The number of viruses in the body - the viral load - initially rises in the days after infection, usually peaks around the sixth day and then falls again, explains Yates.
According to rough estimates, an infected person has between one and a hundred billion copies of coronavirus in the body at the peak of the viral load.
How many people are infected with Sars-CoV-2 can only be guessed, because there is an unreported number of recognized and reported cases.
Experts currently estimate that there are around 2.5 million new corona infections worldwide every day, around half a million are officially reported every day.
Yates reckons with three million infected people per day, who then produce viruses for several days.
So he comes to the conclusion that with the current number of infections there are around two trillion, 2 times 1018, coronaviruses worldwide.
And this enormous number of viruses fits, because each of them is so small, in turn into a volume of around 160 milliliters, Yates calculates.
It is taken into account that spheres cannot fit perfectly, so there are also free spaces.
In other words: not even a Coke can full of viruses has gotten us into the current situation.
How great the effort is to solve these, on the other hand, hardly fits into a mathematical formula.
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