Jul 11, 2021 20:00:00

How many kilograms will it be if we collect new coronaviruses from all over the world?

The size of the particles of the new coronavirus is 80 to 220 nm in diameter, which is about 1/660 of the size of

human hair, but it is a serious threat to the health of people all over the world. A study to estimate how much such a new coronavirus exists in the human body led to the question, 'How many kilograms would it weigh if we collected the new coronavirus that occurs in the body of all human beings?'

The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions | PNAS
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/25/e2024815118

How much does all the SARS-CoV-2 in the world weigh? | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/sars-cov-2-weight-calculation.html

A research team led by Ron Sender, a PhD student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said that the number of new coronaviruses in the human body is time-consuming as part of a study to better understand the mechanism by which the new coronavirus propagates. We conducted a simulation to investigate how it changes with the progress of.

Mr. Sender and Professor Ron Miro, who supervised Mr. Sender's research, told the science news site Live Science, 'Looking back on history, for example, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weighed only 100 kg. It was less than a nuclear material, but it caused tremendous destruction. Similarly, the ultra-small virus, the new corona virus, is also causing havoc in the world. '

First, in order to calculate the number of viruses possessed by one infected person, the research team first infects rhesus monkeys with the new coronavirus and then measures the virus concentration in body tissues based on the data of experiments that measure the virus in the human body. Estimated the number of particles. As a result, it was found that the number of virus particles generated in the body of an individual infected with the new coronavirus reaches 1 billion to 100 billion at the peak.

Since the mass of one particle of the new coronavirus is about 1/1000 g, the total weight of the virus particles in the body of a person infected with the new coronavirus is calculated to be about 0.1 mg at the maximum. When this data was applied to the scenario that 'the total number of people infected with the new coronavirus by the end of the pandemic is within the range of 500 million to 5 billion', the total number of new coronaviruses in the world at the time of writing the paper was calculated. The result is that the weight is 100g to 10kg.

According to the research team, this research, which clarified the rate of replication of the new coronavirus and the number of cells infected, can be applied to research fields such as prediction of the rate at which mutant strains occur. In fact, when the research team applied the number of genomes of the new coronavirus and the incidence of mutations to the results of this research, it seems that the results were almost the same as the pace at which mutant strains were discovered so far. is.

'We hope that our research will trigger new experiments and research,' said Sender and colleagues.