So wash your hands and gargle and your symptoms are mild?
If you need to go out, when you come back, remove all clothes and wash and then have a shower.
The basic theory is that if you catch the virus, you want to have it in your nose first so your body has time to start a response before it reaches your lungs.
If you get a large dose into your lungs at the start (perhaps because you work at a hospital with insufficient PPE) it's less likely to be mild.
That's a thought that has crossed my mind before: if it's better the farther up in the respiratory system the initial infection happens, then all that hand washing might be a bad idea, at least for the personal outcome. It depends a lot on wether you expect the full wave to eventually roll through until herd immunity or if you expect it to be stopped early, either by continued distancing until it's starved our by a vaccine.
Huh? How does that figure? Hand washing will means less (or no) virii in your nose/mouth.
So, isn't it (a) good in itself, and (b) totally orthogonal to the infection happening "farther up in the respiratory system" (aside the positive, that if it happens and is further up, it will also be less viral content)
If you make "first contact" by inhaling tiny droplets it's possible that they will make landfall right down in the lungs, whereas an infection from dirty fingers is guaranteed to start in the nose/mouth area and will already be an immune system project while it works it's way deeper down. Still worse than not getting infected at all, but if you assume that it will eventually hit you anyways, easing into the infection via the nose would surely be preferable to starting in the lungs where it's actually dangerous.
The reverse of this would be accumulating an infective dose from the leakage amount allowed through by PPE while working in extreme exposure. I doubt that there is empirical data regarding viruses, but everything we've learned about particulate emissions suggests that smaller particles reach deeper into the lungs. So it seems quite convincing to me that people who do fall ill despite PPE fall ill harder. Might explain the prominent medical worker deaths.
If the virus replicates more slowly, a large infectious dose would have the same impact as multiple replication generations.
I'm not asserting the above is what happens, I'm asking the question.
The Vmin to be detected by your immune system is small. You want the most time between Vdetected and Vdanger.
Some guy vomited in a restaurant. Then you can clearly model the time from exposure to symptoms in everyone else based on how far away they were when the guy vomited. Though in this case the viral exposure was very high for everyone in the restaurant.
For influenza, each infected cell apparently infects ~22 other cells:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1563736/
So in 2 generations you have 500x the virus.
If it were 'less' exponential, and each cell only infected, say, 5 others, then you get to 500x late in the 4th generation.
In a cartoon example where a low exposure leads to 1 infected cell and a high exposure leads to 500 infected cells, the low exposure matters more if the reproductive factor is lower.
[Mumbles something about hormesis.]
Err, you can wash your hands, and it will "disinfect them".
And if the viral content is still in your nose/mouth/neck, you can dissinfect that too to some degree.
So, there's that...
In Bavaria they are only testing people with symptoms and the positive rate is around 10% [1].
Everybody thinks they have it but the symptoms could also be down to a cold. I am not pointing this statistic out to prove you wrong -- I just find it interesting.
[1] https://www.lgl.bayern.de/gesundheit/infektionsschutz/infekt... and search on the page for 'Laboruntersuchungen'. The left axis is number of tests and the right axis is percentage of positive tests.