And I've pointed out that sneeze particles are a rather pointless number and don't reflect how you get sick. People cover sneezes, walk away a bit, hold sneezes, etc. People don't say tilt their head up and spray a room with a sneeze. Same thing with coughs, people don't get coughed on like ever (besides for kids coughing sometimes). Saying there's all these particles in a sneeze/cough does not equate to how you catch colds in real life. And you even said in a prior post that you don't even know how many of the sneeze particles are active/inactive.
There's no data showing that going to a store and shopping is in any way risky for catching a cold.
Let's recap: The point you have been trying to argue was that a sneeze containing "many times over an infectious dose", is "a ridiculous statement".
That right there was what I've been pushing back against: You made a direct claim about the viral load contained in a sneeze. I explained to you that it's a simple well-corroborated fact that a given sneeze in an infected individual does in fact contain many times the infectious dose.
Moreover, as part of that, I explained to you: "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."
You know...that same thing you're now trying to invoke yourself, only you're going well beyond the scope and saying that it renders that number 'pointless'? It's not 'pointless', it's part and parcel of why the damn disease doesn't go extinct. Since any given particle has a very low chance of infecting a new host, the virus compensates with extreme numbers.
To put it directly: viruses can't control the circumstances under which a sneeze spreads their particles. Most droplets won't reach another person, and most viral particles that do will never successfully start an infection. If respiratory viruses only produced the minimum number of particles needed for infection, the disease would quickly die out
because too few transmission events would succeed.
So respiratory disease compensate with numbers, releasing many times more viral particles than the infectious dose as what amounts to statistical insurance. Because the virus cannot control where droplets travel or whether they reach a susceptible host, producing large numbers greatly increases the chance that at least some particles will successfully infect someone else. Without that redundancy, transmission would mostly require extremely rare "perfect" conditions, like a sneeze directly into another person's nose.
In this respect, it's similar to how mushrooms reproduce. A single mushroom releases millions to billions of spores. That huge number is
necessary because the release is uncontrolled and most spores land somewhere unsuitable for growth. Almost all of the spores fail, but producing enormous quantities increases the probability that at least a few will land in the right environment and develop into new mushrooms.
Again:
this is basic epidemiology. And you clearly aren't even trying to understand it, just rejecting it out of hand because it was introduced to you in the form of a correction to one of your statements.