I think the common factor between COVID and smallpox is their long incubation times, which isn’t shared by something like 95% of current ambient disease (not sure about historically).
This makes sense with the proposed mechanism. There must be some short length of incubation period where your immune system wouldn’t have time to get much stronger even if given double the notice, some longer period where it can definitely grow much stronger given double the notice, and some even longer period where the body has ample time to react no matter the starting load. It also fits the immune response time relatively well: the short term response of IgM antibodies takes around a week, so diseases that took around 1-3 weeks of progression would be right in the sweet spot of getting substantially more exponential response from your immune system from advance notice of a few doublings (several days of viral growth).
The one countervailing consideration is that the incubation periods for a lot of diseases are a bit longer than I had thought. I can’t tell if this is an artifact of them including outliers rather than just the middle 95% or something. But it still seems like the difference between a 4-day and 10-day incubation period could explain why viral load doesn’t matter much in most diseases. It also suggests that chickenpox, rubeola, rubella, whooping cough, and mumps are good places to look for outcome dependence on initial viral load.
COVID and smallpox is their long incubation times, which isn’t shared by something like 95% of current ambient disease
I’m not sure what current ambient disease means.
Where do you get the figure of 95% from?
If you’re talking about “colds and flu” then yes they do have short incubation times but many other viruses have long incubation times for example HIV, hepatitis causing viruses
I think the common factor between COVID and smallpox is their long incubation times, which isn’t shared by something like 95% of current ambient disease (not sure about historically).
This makes sense with the proposed mechanism. There must be some short length of incubation period where your immune system wouldn’t have time to get much stronger even if given double the notice, some longer period where it can definitely grow much stronger given double the notice, and some even longer period where the body has ample time to react no matter the starting load. It also fits the immune response time relatively well: the short term response of IgM antibodies takes around a week, so diseases that took around 1-3 weeks of progression would be right in the sweet spot of getting substantially more exponential response from your immune system from advance notice of a few doublings (several days of viral growth).
The one countervailing consideration is that the incubation periods for a lot of diseases are a bit longer than I had thought. I can’t tell if this is an artifact of them including outliers rather than just the middle 95% or something. But it still seems like the difference between a 4-day and 10-day incubation period could explain why viral load doesn’t matter much in most diseases. It also suggests that chickenpox, rubeola, rubella, whooping cough, and mumps are good places to look for outcome dependence on initial viral load.
I’m not sure what current ambient disease means.
Where do you get the figure of 95% from?
If you’re talking about “colds and flu” then yes they do have short incubation times but many other viruses have long incubation times for example HIV, hepatitis causing viruses
https://www.virology.ws/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screenshot-2014-10-07-13.18.17.png
Some figures for incubation periods for various diseases:
wiki/Incubation_period
The second link was meant to be to incubation times, now fixed.
I meant ~95% of the times you become sick, i.e. mostly “colds and flus”.