The Coronavirus has a Great Advantage...that could ALSO be its Greatest Weakness

One of the biggest things that makes the SARS-COV2 so dangerous, is that it's SO tiny, it's airborne.  This thing is so damn light and easily transmissible, we're all having to wear masks in public, for the first time in our lives. We never quite know where it is. Is it floating around in the air in the grocery store we're about to walk into? Who knows! The BoogeyMan had nothing on this virus.

But this could be really GOOD NEWS...

The Coronavirus' extremely tiny size gives it a clear advantage, in that it's airborne status makes it very easy to spread from person to person.  But think about it.... that's probably one of the reasons why its considered to be so easy to kill. 

Just think about how THIN that lipid bilayer is, if this virus is so small, it can float around in the air and you can't even see it!

I think most people would agree that, the thinner a layer of fat is, the easier and faster it probably is, to dissolve. 


So, just how thin (aka easy-to-dissolve) is this lipid bilayer?


Let's start with the size of ONE SARS-CoV2 Virion (a single virus cell).

It looks like Coronaviruses are typically 80-120 nanometers (though they can be as small as 50 nm, and as large as 200 nm). So, I estimated that one virion was likely to be about 100 nanometers (later I found a site that said it's more likely to be 120 nm, but for the sake of making the math easier, let's just keep it at 100 nm). 

If one virion was 100 nanometers, that means you could line up 10,000 virions, next to each other, and that would equal ONE MILLIMETER. 



If the whole diameter of one virion is that small.... just imagine how thin that lipid bilayer must be!

How thin is the Lipid Bilayer?

I looked it up on Google, and it seems like that lipid bilayer is about 2-4 nanometers (nm).  Let's just say it's 4nm.   

If I did the math right, the lipid bilayer is 250,000 times thinner than a millimeter.  

In other words... pretty damn thin.

So, uh.... can someone please explain to me why this thing wouldn't be easy to dissolve with a consumable surfactant, like baking soda? 

The SARS-CoV-2 is a large sized virus (approximately 120 nm in diameter) (25-27). The relatively large size and lipid envelope makes it highly susceptible to steps with virus inactivation and removal capacity used during the manufacturing processes, such as solvent-detergent (S/D) (28), low pH incubation, caprylate-, pasteurization- (29) or dry-heat treatments (30), nanofiltration or fractionation processes and others (31). The effectiveness of these processes has been demonstrated on other lipid-enveloped model viruses which are quite similar to SARS-CoV-2, e.g. human coronavirus 229E and OC43, SARS-CoV, and porcine coronavirus TGEV (32-33).

Part of the reason The Blair Witch Project was so frightening for the people who saw it before word got out it was fake (OK yes I realize I was one of the gullible who fell for it, but I saw it on the first day it came out, ok). 

There's something really scary about The Unknown. Things we can't even see can be very scary.  It's like when a parent tells that you have till the count of 10, to get your butt into bed. Suddenly, you're scrambling to get under the covers, but the fact is, you don't really know what's going to happen. You just know that you don't want to know!