Like if just one viral particle gets into your system, what’s more likely to happen: it proliferates undetected and cause an infection, or the immune system eliminates it before it can do so?
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Every virion has a small chance of successfully infecting a cell. The immune system will usually spot a cell acting strange or showing off the wrong proteins to “guard” cells and tell the cell to kill itself. A single virion could beat the odds, but it’s rare. Imagine that each one has a 1/100 (so 1%) chance of successful infection — one particle will be hard to entrench, but if you put in 1000 particles, you will likely get a few infected cells and have a baseline for the disease to start up.
I think norovirus takes something like 20 to have a good chance of succeeding at its life cycle, which is terrifying.
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