Whether you become very sick of covid-19 or almost no symptoms will get may very well depend on how you will become infected with the disease. Or rather how much virus you get infected with.
It explains the Peter Skinhøj, professor emeritus and past chief consultant physician at the infectious disease Department at the national university hospital.
“If you become infected with a large amount of the virus at one time, so it is likely that you also tend to develop stronger symptoms of the disease,” says Peter Skinhøj.
It is not documented that it applies to covid-19, but the theory is widely used in medical services, as several other viruses behaving in this way.
these include The measles, which the Danish researcher Peter Aaby documented back in the late 1970s, when he was doing a research project in the small west african country of Guinea-Bissau.
Down below, there was a dramatic excess mortality of measles among children. But Peter Aaby showed that the first child in a family usually only had mild symptoms of measles. In exchange, the child’s siblings – who often slept in the same bed as their sick brother or sister – is significantly more severe symptoms and death in some cases.
“I was actually the opponent (medical examiner, red.) in the dissertation, which he wrote, so I remember it clearly,” says Peter Skinhøj, and continues:
“The children who were exposed to the very infection of their siblings, it is simply much worse than the children, as the total mæslingerne up the outside of the home, where one must assume that smittemængden was significantly less,” he says.
“It is very likely that the same applies for the covid-19, so you for example become significantly more ill, if you become infected, when you sleep next to your corona-infected wife, than if you just inhaled two drops of the virus somewhere out in the open,” he says.
Peter Skinhøj explains that one does not know, why it probably is so, that you become more sick when you are exposed to more virus. But one explanation is that the body is overwhelmed by viral load until the immune system when to react.
Breathe, for example, two small viruses, which drills into the cells, so the breaks the only virus out from the two cells to start with. Breathing of the 3,000 small viruses, so there will break the new virus from 3,000 cells in the body. It gives everything else being equal, the immune system less time to react.
Peter Skinhøj believe, however, that one can take precautions in the home, so that you get a milder illness, if one’s nearest become infected.
“I know a couple where the one was sick. So divided the apartment up completely. But actually I don’t think it has any significance. There will be so much the virus on surfaces, in air, food and other things, that the difference is negligible,” he says.
So there is no point to impose his better half to sleep in the basement, if he or she is sick?
“No, I think unfortunately not. The difference is too small. There is still much virus,” he says.
If the patient’s symptoms will be more severe depending on the amount of infection, so it can also be of great importance for all doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, as suits the sick patients.
Two researchers in genomics, professor Joshua Rabinowitz, and Caroline Bartman, describes, among other things, in the New York Times that it was likely that the chinese 34-year-old doctor Li Wenliang, who treated many chinese patients at the beginning of the pandemic, dead precisely because he was exposed to large amounts of infection.