Perhaps disease spread takes more advantage of tiny amounts of contact than one would expect from a model of p(illness) ∝ amount of pathogen contacted
It would be quite tragic if different immune system strength would be more important then amount of pathogen contacted for getting infected. All those medical professionals who had an excuse to study derivation of immune system strength over tiem would suddenly lose their excuses...
Yeah. There’s also things like how easy it is for your body to detect and kill (maybe infection rate is strongly sublinear in dose because of this), where the pathogen lands (if a tiny target needs to be hit and pathogen usually hits you in a single localized area, number of exposures may be more important than dose), whether a substrain is already adapted to by your immune system, etc. Nothing too crazy can be true here because of empirics but certainly mildly crazy things may be.
It would be quite tragic if different immune system strength would be more important then amount of pathogen contacted for getting infected. All those medical professionals who had an excuse to study derivation of immune system strength over tiem would suddenly lose their excuses...
Yeah. There’s also things like how easy it is for your body to detect and kill (maybe infection rate is strongly sublinear in dose because of this), where the pathogen lands (if a tiny target needs to be hit and pathogen usually hits you in a single localized area, number of exposures may be more important than dose), whether a substrain is already adapted to by your immune system, etc. Nothing too crazy can be true here because of empirics but certainly mildly crazy things may be.