More than 170 million people have been infected, scientists have calculated the total weight of all new coronaviruses

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More than 170 million people have been infected, scientists have calculated the total weight of all new coronaviruses

At present, the cumulative number of confirmed patients with new coronavirus infection worldwide has exceeded 170 million, and the death toll has exceeded 3.7 million. With so many infected people, what is the weight of all the new coronaviruses together? Some scientists performed calculations.

According to foreign media reports, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated the weight of the global new coronavirus to be between 0.22 and 22 pounds (about 0.1 to 10 kilograms).

To calculate the total weight of the new coronavirus, you first need to determine how much virus each infected person can carry. To this end, the researchers conducted experiments on rhesus monkeys to calculate the number of new coronaviruses in the lungs, tonsils, lymph nodes and other organs at the peak.

After obtaining the number of virus particles per gram of tissue in the rhesus monkey, multiply it by the number of human tissues, and finally calculate the number of virus particles in human tissues. Using the mass of each particle and the estimated number of particles, they calculated that each person carried approximately 1 microgram to 10 micrograms of virus particles during the peak period of infection.

Researchers said that during the new coronavirus pandemic, there are about 1 million to 10 million confirmed patients at any time, and the peak period of each infected person is about 10 billion to 100 billion virus particles. According to this calculation, the world The total weight of all new coronavirus particles is between 0.22 and 22 pounds.

In addition, through the calculated data, researchers can further understand the infection process of the new coronavirus in the human body, such as how many cells are infected, and the comparison between the number of virus particles produced in the human body and the evolution speed of the virus.