You didn't just say it can be enough, you said it was many times over an infectious dose, that's a ridiculous statement.
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:
The infectious dose is something that gets past all your defenses, that's the definition of that term.
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.
