Bite Point

Covid-19 Worldwide Numbers, Mass and Volume

I've wondered for a long time how many copies of the Covid-19 RNA there are in the world at any given time. Now, we have some good estimates.

Each infected person carries 10⁹ to 10¹¹ Covid-19 virions at peak of infection.

Assuming during most of the course of the pandemic there has been a total of 1–10 million infected people close to peak infection globally at any given time, including those undetected, we arrive at a total of 10¹⁷ to 10¹⁹ viral particles in the world at any given time.

Let's split the difference at 10¹⁸.That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 if we write it out longhand. One quintillion, if we use the accepted math word. To give some idea of how large a number a quintillion is: It's about fifteen quintillion miles from our galaxy, the Milky Way, to the Andromeda Galaxy.

A quintillion is a stupid-big number, for sure.

Each Covid-19 virion has a mass of ≈1 femtogram. Therefore even when the human body carries 10⁹ to 10¹¹ viral particles, these have a mass of only about 1–100 μg. When we consider the total number of infected people at any given time, the total mass of Covid-19 virions residing in humanity at that given time is on the order of 0.1–10 kg.

As for volume? All the Covid-19 virions in the world would likely fit inside a can of soda.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685332/

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-global-weight-sars-cov-viruses-kilograms.html

https://theconversation.com/all-the-coronavirus-in-the-world-could-fit-inside-a-coke-can-with-plenty-of-room-to-spare-154226

Leverage Perspective

The total weights of the atomic bombs employed in WWII were 64kg uranium + 6kg plutonium = 70kg, which killed 226,000 human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (This figure does not include long-term early deaths from radiation poisoning, which are much more difficult to calculate.)

The total estimated weight of all the Covid-19 virions in the world at any given time is 0.1kg-10kg. Let us use the high end estimate. We know that 10kg of Covid-19 virions has, so far, killed some 4,500,000 human beings worldwide.

This gives us a leverage perspective:

Each kilogram of Covid-199 virus kills 450,000 people at current conditions.
Each kilogram of fissile material killed 3,229 people, in the only example we know ... to date.

Covid-19 is thus approximately 140 times more effective, per weight of material, at killing human beings than are atomic bombs.