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Comment by juskrey | Hacker News Reader

After years of self-observations I have a petty theory that, in addition to outside infections, we always have a zoo of cold viruses inside, and different factors trigger them from time to time. I am quite surprised this is never discussed and mentioned by scientific community. BTW for some other viruses this is well documented and acknowledged, but with cold/flu/covid we seem to suffer worldwide scientific amnesia.

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Sorry I can't find the article, perhaps drowned in covid articles however:

There is a well known research paper from years ago showing that both exposure to cold temperatures and exposure to cold virus could cause cold symptoms, if I recollect right 30% probability when subjects were intentionally exposed to virus, 10% when exposed to cold temperatures. I don't recall the control group results.

This is consistent with covid appearing as an outbreak out of nowhere.

I have heard this before as well. Viruses and colds can live in the throat for weeks or months, people are constantly collecting them. When said person gets rundown, the immune system can't contain them, and they produce a cold or sickness.

I thought this is how viruses operated in general. If somebody gets infected by herpes they basically have it for life. It only rarely flares up, but it's clearly still there. I figured this applied to all/most viruses because of the way viruses reproduce. The immune system just takes care of them and prevents the viral load from increasing. Is that not the case?

That is not always the case. Only certain types of viruses such as herpes viruses remain dormant in the patient's body. Most respiratory viruses are completely cleared out within a few weeks, assuming the patient survives and has a functioning immune system.

But how? I'm genuinely curious. Don't viruses reproduce by getting cells to make copies of them? Is the immune system really capable of removing all of the affected cells?

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