If you're young the first is probably a mild cold while the latter is a trip to the ICU.
Part of bringing the virus under control is reducing the amount of particles people are exposed to so they have a better chance of fighting off the virus.
It depends on how fast the virus population doubles. And how fast the immune system kicks in.
If the virus population doubles every second then the person who swallowed 30 virus particles will be at 300,000 in just 14 seconds.
If it doubles once per minute, it is 14 minutes. If it doubles once per hour, it is 14 hours.
The question if that is a meaningful headstart depends on how fast the immune system reacts. And if it reacts faster to 300k viruses than to 30.
I'm not saying you are right or wrong. I'm saying that immune reactions aren't linear, straightforward, harmless or predictable. And that "more virus" usually isn't better.
That was also my intuitive response at the beginning of the pandemic. I assume one virus was plenty due to exponential growth. Having read every article I could in the past year, it's extremely rare to run across any details but:
1. I've read that scientists believe a coronavirus takes hundreds of viruses to successfully infect us. Not, for example, several dozen like some other viruses.
2. Next obvious question to me is, is this because one has to land on a lucky spot on the body and the rest somehow die before they can reproduce (so it's statistical odds that one virus gets the conditions it needs just like one sperm makes it to the egg)? Or can the body fight off a dozen or two dozen covid19 viruses so quickly that they never take hold? I only see two possibilities here.
3. If it is the latter, an answer I can't find anywhere, why did we need to waste so much time developing a vaccine? Wouldn't it be equally efficacious to introduce one virus to the body on day one, four on day two, and so on until immunity is achieved? Evidence of this possibility would be mixed in with the population they believe are asymptomatic, so unless researchers look for this they won't find it. (Basically a natural immunity hypothesis - based on repeated low viral count exposure.)
Aren’t all the doublings local?
Introducing the virus like this, you’ve created a live virus vaccine. The work involved in creating and testing such a vaccine isn’t really any less than creating the vaccines we did make. You still have to develop technology to grow the virus and distribute exactly the right quantity. Moreover, the risk of complications is far greater if someone fails to fight off the small viral load infection.
The vaccines such as Moderna only took a week or two to prototype in January 2020. The entire rest of the time was scaling up production and running tests to prove it worked in the population. We could have skipped running the trials and deployed the untested vaccine instead. A lot of lives would have been saved but no way to know that without doing the trials, I suppose.
Cells produce more than one additional particule per reproduction cycle, so the doubling rate is lower than 8 to 72h.
It progressed linearly because the breathing system is a duct. Like a fire needs a boundary to expand, a frontier. It is not 3D but 2 dimensional.
You just can not do an exponential calculation, without taking into account the physical limits of the environment.
Just before entering the lungs I did beat it. I coughed for a month or so,specially for the irritation in my glottis, but nothing serious.
This year I got it again, the progress rate was very similar but my immune system reacted sooner.
What is interesting is that I did not developed antibodies, my antibodies test were negative but the PCRs positives. This means that my T cells were already fighting the infection.
That probably had something to do with living in China in the past and having developed immunity against SARS.
Only about 8000 persons have been recorded to come down with SARS. Were you one of them with a diagnosed case of SARS (10% fatality rate)? The vast majority of residents in China would have no exposure to SARS.
How long it took / how fast it progressed from one drop almost to lungs (with what treatment)?
Do you think this could have helped early in your case:
Use of Povidone Iodine Nasal Spray.. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3563092 (March 2020)
or this: nasal rinse and mouthwash, Listerine Antiseptic https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.26514 if the virus landed on the throat ?
What this means is that 30 viral particles do not become 300,000 in 14 seconds. Say that all 30 find cells and infect them, and T-cells destroy 50% before they burst. You have 15 cells that burst and release viruses to infect nearby cells. If you start with 300,000 infected cells, and T-cells destroy 50% before they burst, you have 150,000 cells that burst and release viruses to infect nearby cells.
Low initial infections can often be well controlled and managed by the immune system in this way until antibodies are produced. High load infections can often spiral out of control due to so many initial cells being infected, the physical damage of higher numbers of killed cells, either burst or destroyed, and the high numbers outpacing the body’s ability. Of course this is also a simplification, but I think it demonstrates how initial viral load can have a big effect on outcome.