Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Distancing

Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by rickbad68 on Saturday June 27, 2020 @05:26PM (#23664816)

This is absolutely false. Exposure to a higher number of viruses might increase probably of an infection, but a single virus can certainly lead to a full blown infection in an individual.

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Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by FabHK on Monday June 29, 2020 @02:40PM (#23680842)

There seems to be some evidence that a higher infectious dose will not only increase the probability of an infection, but also its severity.

(This makes sense in a simple thought model where the virus starts replicating once it "hits" you, and then your immune system needs N days to ramp up and attack it back. The bigger the initial load, the more the immune system will have to fight back once it's operational. - Not saying that's how it is, just that this is a simple model to make plausible what appears to be empirically seen.)

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Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by tzs on Saturday June 27, 2020 @08:06PM (#23665717)

The infectious dose for most viruses is higher than that. See [1] and [2].

[1] https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_infective_dose

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Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by ponker on Monday June 29, 2020 @01:45AM (#23674721)

It's a probabilistic process. 1 virion of any virus can infect a host, but for some viruses that probability will be vanishingly small while in others it will just be regular small.

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