Dude, you are literally arguing that because something doesn't make intuitive sense to you (owing largely to your poor understanding of the topic) it has to be wrong.
Maybe consider that rather than stubbornly trying to assert your preconceptions about how you think things should work, you should actually take the time to read up on the subject to figure out how they actually work, and then have the humility to try to learn.
But instead, all you ever seem to do is rationalize to yourself that doing so would be a waste of your time because "common sense" (read: your preconceptions) conflicts with it.
Case in point:
That's plainly wrong. Infectious dose (often expressed as ID₅₀) is a probabilistic benchmark: the approximate amount that can lead to successful infection in a given percentage of exposed hosts under defined conditions. It is not a guaranteed threshold that must bypass all defenses.
Think of it like par in golf. Par doesn’t guarantee you’ll finish the hole in that number of strokes; it’s the expected outcome under typical conditions. ID₅₀ works the same way: at that dose, the expected outcome is that half of exposed hosts get infected and about half don’t.
Or to go military with the analogy, it's like estimating the number of soldiers 'needed' to take a city. It's not some natural law that fewer soldiers cannot succeed and more soldiers are guaranteed to, just that the given number is estimated to be sufficient to do so.
To be direct: You're treating it as a binary cutoff that guarantees infection. Infectious Dose is a measure of infection probability upon absorption. Higher exposure increases the likelihood of infection simply by giving the pathogen more chances. That's very different from "something that gets past all your defenses".
Importantly: Many viruses have extremely low ID₅₀ values, while infected individuals can generate extraordinarily high viral loads in expelled material.
For example, Norovirus has been estimated in human challenge studies to have an ID₅₀ on the order of tens of viral particles, while infected individuals can shed 10⁵ - 10¹¹ viral copies per gram of feces. That means a single gram can contain many orders of magnitude more viral particles than the ID₅₀ benchmark.
Similarly, rhinovirus challenge studies show infection at very low doses (on the order of ~10 TCID₅₀ units), while coughs and sneezes can expel thousands to tens of thousands of viral particles. So it is entirely accurate to say a sneeze can contain many times the infectious dose.
That does not mean infection is guaranteed. Infectious dose describes the quantity required to establish infection under controlled conditions. In real-world transmission, only a fraction of expelled particles reach a susceptible host, deposit in the appropriate tissue, and remain viable. Most are lost to dispersion, inactivation, or host defenses. Hence the sheer volume. A larger number of expelled particles does not ensure infection, it simply increases the probability that enough viable particles will successfully initiate one.
That’s why simple measures like covering coughs and sneezes and keeping distance from sick individuals reduce transmission: they reduce the number of viable particles that reach another host, lowering the probability of infection.
We are talking about foundational epidemiology. This isn’t a controversial claim; it’s standard infectious disease modeling.
If colds were that easy to transfer/catch, people would be sick way more often. People go to the store how often in a year, yet only catch 2-4 colds on average per year, and the vast majority of the time when you catch a cold, it's from a person you're with for a prolonged period of time like a family member, a friend, a co-worker, a child that goes to school (catches stuff from other children they are in the same room for hours with), etc. The chances of catching a cold from a store is so very low.
Yes, I know it's essentially an average. It takes X amount viral particles to get infected from rhinovirus. Yes, not every person is the same, some take less to get infected, some take more, X is the average. Yes, infectious dose does mean how much it takes to get past your defenses (ON AVERAGE).
We're are as close as we can practically get to demonstrating that a non-negligible risk exists. Likely from one fleeting interaction? Certainly not. But you have hundreds a day, untold thousands a year.
You essentially said it just doesn't happen. Which is obvious horseshit.
I have no interest in discussing whether we should be "concerned", because i don't particularly think we should be.
No idea, but you fall for this fake outrage-farming dross all the time, and I'm urging you to think.
You've shown nothing that proves people should be concerned about getting sick from going to the store. I get together with friends at least 4 times a week for hours each time and haven't gotten sick this whole cold season. If that is already a rather low chance of getting sick, how is going to the grocery store something that I should have any concern with?
I never said it doesn't at all happen, my whole point has been it's nothing to be concerned about literally the entire time.
I (we) lived through covid just a few years back, I literally saw what happened, what people did; this isn't some historical thing that I wasn't alive for or happened when I was a kid. Just because one such photo I found what googling for a photo was photoshoped doesn't prove it didn't happen. My uncle/aunt cleaned their car and groceries every time when going to the store during covid. There's one person in our board game group that still wears a mask to this day, he even wears a mask outside at pool parties, and just recently we had an all day even at a church (there's like 30 people in this massive hall with tables throughout) and he went outside to his car to eat because he wasn't comfortable just moving to a table away from people and not having a mask on.
Gamer, Errant Signal (@ basically the 7min mark), only met with friends during covid by going to a park, sitting on separate benches, and wearing a mask. That is how ridiculous and illogical people acted during covid. I wonder why people were so depressed...
