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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

At a 0.2% rate. Nothing to welcome, sure, but also not something worth defeatism.

From where are you drawing that rate? I was speaking of Dr. Li Wenliang, aged 33, who was one of the initial 8 doctors to raise the alarm and try to stop this epidemic in Wuhan months ago.

From everything I've read, both in Chinese and English, considerably more than 1% of the medical personnel at the front lines have perished.

I have read that the amount of exposure can be quantified, and it is possible to have a heavy dose of the virus -- which makes no sense to me -- and that healthcare workers are likely to receive these heavy doses due to frequent exposure.

I always thought that once a virus was present in your system, it was there, like a boolean, not like a degree of infection. But apparently that is not true.

That idea is not true and in fact is extremely dangerous thinking. One example is HIV. It isn't a matter of having it or not having it, the viral load makes a big difference as to what symptoms someone may exhibit as well as how likely they are to infect someone else. If your viral load is low enough then the chances of infecting other people can get low enough to be considered non-existant. On the other hand if you expose yourself to more sources of HIV, it could increase your viral load and increase symptoms and complications associated with the virus.

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