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Viral illness throughout the household. What might be happening?
We are a household of 5 people with 2 little ones. That means we get to experience the joy and pleasures of viruses the little ones tend to bring home. After a few of those I've noticed a pattern, each viral infection within the household tends to last 2+ weeks.
- Patient zero brings the virus home and has symptoms
- One of the adults starts developing symptoms shortly after. Everyone else is fine.
- Each other person goes down like domino's but with few days in between. By the time the 3rd or last person is ill the 1st and 2nd person are recovered and healthy. In some instances there my be 1 person that never develops any symptoms, or has no symptoms but is very tired/weak.
This got me thinking, and for context I know nothing about viruses or medicine in general. What is happening here?
- Do all people get infected but not everyone develops symptoms?
- Do some peoples immune systems successfully fight off the viral infection completely or partially?
I'm ruling out anyone being able to avoid contact to escape viral infection due to the size and social dynamics of the household.
I think small measures can have a big impact in avoiding other people getting sick (or as sick), even if you can't avoid contact.
One thing you can do is understand the modes of transmission of different illnesses and act accordingly.
Many of the respiratory illnesses like flu (and the whole ILI or influenza-like-illness category) and COVID are primarily transmitted through droplets in the air from coughing or sneezing. So covering your mouth / coughing and sneezing into a tissue, wearing a mask, increasing ventilation are all going to improve outcomes for people who are exposed. Flu can survive on surfaces for 24-48 hours, so disinfecting high tough areas can help. Others, like COVID, don't last long in the environment, which is why we got to stop disinfecting our groceries.
Others, like norovirus are transmitted primarily by the so-called "fecal-oral route" which just means getting poop germs in your mouth. So hand-washing, especially before eating, will go a long way. Norovirus is very hardy in the environment, so good disinfection is really important.
I didn't read this as a "help identify the illness" post, but rather as a "why is there such a delay/offset in the spread"
My answer would be that it's simply due to incubation periods and how it spreads - If one of the kids brings it home and it's something that easily spreads via coughs it'll be the people that breathe it in that get it first, then others who are more at a distance will get it later from those infected by the kid.
Factor in immune systems, incubation periods, just how bad the exposure was, etc...
That's right, thanks :)
It's just genuine curiosity in a generalised form. Not looking for any specifics of my current symptoms or anything.
My understanding is viral load makes a huge difference. The person exposed to a room where they breathe in five hundred viruses an hour might need several hours of exposure to get sick, while the person in a room breathing three thousand viruses an hour might get sick after just ten or fifteen minutes. And of course viral shedding by the sick person varies a lot, so some days they virus up the room air much more than other days.
If climate allows, increased ventilation around the sick person or people (to reduce viral load in the air) would likely reduce these severity of illness in the exposed people.
Also, I imagin if you breathe in a giant blob of freshly coughed up viruses right into your lungs, you might shorten the incubation period by a bunch of duplication periods. Plus maybe give your immune system a harder time, as the time from detection to dangerous viral load is shorter, but that part is conjecture.
In a small household with a lot of contact with each other, pretty much yes.
Also yes, some people's immune systems will identify and fight off the virus before it gets enough of a foothold to cause symptoms.
Someone else mentioned viral load, that's an important factor. It's primarily a factor in early exposure, before the person's immune system has developed antibodies. If your initial exposure is a larger amount of the virus, there's a bigger chance it will spread more before your immune system can mount a response.
Another important factor is rest and overall health. If your immune system is rundown or depressed (stress, lack of sleep, etc..) then you're more likely to get a bad case of whatever it is.
If my amateur virology from covid applies here, then a good way of achieving nonsymptomatic infections is to (obviously) have an immune system that already knows what's up, or (less obviously) introduce your immune system to a very small amount of virus, so the immune system can handle it without too much trouble. Basically shitty improvised vaccination. Don't think one can reliably achieve this though, so don't try it. But might explain things.
It's a standard system of exposure and contagion: Patient zero brings it in and contaminates the rest who get varying degrees of sick based on viral load (pre-illness), and whatever other factors affect how bad an illness is for an individual.
A case for me: Three people, me, mom, and my brother. I went to Ikea with my brother one day, he wore a mask and I didn't. My mom pops a positive COVID test, I and mom develop symptoms on a similar timeline: I get a nose tickle Tuesday night, she gets a sore throat Wednesday morning. As soon as I pop a positive, with my brother sitting three feet behind me in a room with constantly moving air, we wear facemasks during the day, and the next night I wear a face mask to bed (he had been wearing a face mask the day I was positive).
My brother got less sick, likely due to a significantly diminished viral load. I only had severe sinus swelling and body aches that sudafed and tylenol fixed, similarly to my mom, but he barely got a mild sniffle. This is purely anecdotal but this tracks with what has been published about COVID.
Exposure is not a guarantee of illness or severity, even. During peak COVID a lot of the rules were to rule out the possibility of asymptomatic infection, but you could also be my dad working a COVID ward in a hospice facility, or my mom through the majority of the pandemic, and be the only one not getting sick.
This is to contextualize my answer based on experience:
This is a known phenomenon with COVID, but I don't think it would be wild to say it happens with other viruses, be they any of the hundreds of common cold viruses or influenza.
Potentially? But this would be checked using tools that not only check for infection, but specifically relative viral loads so in general if you're exposed you should probably quarantine as if you are sick, even if it's away from actually sick folks, for a couple days. Unfortunately parents/people in relationships have things like "responsibilities" or "care for their loved ones" that require us to also administer soup, tea, and blankets as needed, so it's not always done except for those worst of illnesses.