Invited to a BBC radio program, Christian Yates, a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath (UK), calculated the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 (Chinese Communist virus) in the world today.
He started with the daily number of infections worldwide. According to official figures, the number of new infections worldwide is now about 500,000 per day. But many people have no symptoms and do not know they are infected, some refuse to be tested, some countries have poor testing mechanisms, and other factors taken together, Yates estimates that the number of new infections worldwide is no less than 3 million per day.
According to medical knowledge, the number of viruses carried by infected people is increasing from the first day of infection until it reaches a peak on the 6th day after infection, after which it starts to decrease again. Thus, on average, those infected before the 6th day of infection have the highest number of viruses in their bodies each day.
A study just published in preprint online provides information showing that the number of CCP viruses per infected person ranges from 1 billion to 100 billion. Yates took the middle number of 10 billion for his calculations and multiplied it by 3 million people to give a global number of 2 x 10¹⁷ viruses at any given moment.
How big is this number? Yates says it’s about the same as the amount of sand on the planet. Of course, viruses are much smaller than sand.
Yates says each CCP virus can be thought of as a sphere, and they are between 80 and 120 nanometers in diameter, less than one thousandth the diameter of a human hair. Yates calculated all the viruses with an average diameter of 100 nanometers, substituting the familiar sphere volume formula V=4π r³/3, resulting in a volume of 523,000 cubic nanometers for each CCP virus.
Multiplying such a very small volume by a huge number again gives a total volume of about 120 ml.
Finally, Yates said, one must also take into account the fact that spheres cannot be stacked closely together, and that there would be space between them. According to a “sphere optimal stacking” rule, the gap between them would be 26% of the total volume.
Thus, the total volume of these viruses when stacked would be about 160 milliliters – less than the volume of a Coke. Yates said that even if the upper limit of virus diameter were used in the above calculation, the viruses could still easily fit into a Coke can.
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