Can you protect yourself against viral infections through repeated short exposures?

A health professional recently told me that she and her colleagues rarely get viral illnesses and she thought that that was because they were constantly having short meetings with patient after patient and so getting micro-exposures that maybe acted like innoculations.

Is that a real, known thing? Does it have any scientific empirical evidence or rationale to back it up?

I've been wondering if it's a principle I can use to emerge from four years of shielding - to quickly nip into a shop for five minutes a day for a few months.

 

Does regularly crashing your car a bit, protect you from having a bigger car crash? I don't know.

Generally speaking it seems the effects of viral load on illness will depend on the virus and a ton of other factors (including your immune system), but it's certainly not something you can control well. For Covid, which is probably one of the reasons your asking, the effects of viral load haven't been well understood at all as far as I can tell, certainly not on an individual level.

I could be wrong, but this story sounds a bit like the made up conspiracy of "immunity debt". I certainly wouldn't trust the opinion of this health care professional on this matter, but it's definitely something a real immunologist that knows all about T-cells, immunity etc. can answer.

Are there statistics on whether GPs get sick with certain viruses more often? I was under the impression that GPs or preschool teachers, probably get sick slightly more often, but not that much more often then the general population, precisely because they develop immunity to things circulating, which often means they'll get sick for the first time, but not the second time.

But that's hardly a sensible strategy. It's like totaling your car when you get it, because then you can't total it anymore.

 

I don't know anything about disease spread, but I always assumed that if I got caught in the crossfire of a sneeze or a cough that any pathogens that I breathed in or swallowed or got on my skin would multiply in my body, at least until such time as my immune system got its act together and mustered a defence.

If that is the case then it explains why contagious illness (like respiratory infections) get worse and worse then (usually) start getting better and better.

Perhaps some people are better at mounting that immune system defense than others, and can stop some diseases in their tracks early whereas others can't stop it for ages causing more damage in the process.

 

It sounds like a garbled version of the 'hygiene hypothesis', the idea that being too clean is bad for you, but that applies to bacteria rather than viruses. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/is-the-hygiene-hypothesis-true

 

Yeah it’s a mash up of the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ stale desiccated bullshit and ‘immunity debt’ steaming fresh bullshit.

‘Immunity debt’ was only accepted so easily as it was because the public was primed to believe it, having likely grown up with ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ or the more sciencey version the ‘hygiene hypothesis’.

So ‘immunity debt’ sounds both ‘sciencey’ and familiar enough to be palatable to a public desperate for it to be true.

Pseudoscientific propaganda, for employers not wanting to pay out for PPE, ventilation upgrades, air filtration, sick leave, reduced density work/consumer spaces. As well as reduced demand for higher risk social activities, which was the price of mask mandates reminding everyone the pandemic is still going and the virus is still maiming and killing. Not to mention the propaganda push necessary to avoid liability claims made by workers and their survivors
in regard to harm and deaths caused by dangerous workplace conditions due to lack of infection control measures.

The thing is, if you’re a nurse or doctor or teacher or bus driver or child who swims in the over used public pool, or pharmacy worker and you get sick all the time sooner or later you will have to change your lifestyle or occupation. You will be fired eventually unless you quit first. Too much sick time isn’t tolerated. The parent will withdraw their child from swimming if they are threatened with a social worker or court action over missed schooling. So it’s self selecting. Who stays well enough stays around. Who doesn’t disappears.

A health worker who doesn’t succumb to sickness can carry on and tell all their patients that being around infections is what stopped them from getting infections.

That said currently the nursing staff and the doctors with ‘strong immune systems’ are all going off sick so regularly that it would be impossible to force them all out of the profession. A new paradigm if you like, everyone sick, for some reason I can’t imagine why

That said check out the number of medics forced out of their profession and into poverty by a run in with a certain infection or all the others that come after the first one, infection that they can no longer fend off after finding their immune systems rather less robust after the first infection.



Also though as others have mentioned even a moments exposure could end in serious illness or death with some infectious agent or for some people, I don’t think a medical consultation however short in a confined space with limited ventilation would count as a small exposure. It’s plenty long enough to cause damage.

Also do remember, medical professionals are notoriously superstitious and ideological about these matters. The engineers and other scientists concerned with physics have been much more reliable sources of factual information this pandemic.

 

By the way my GP surgery has been closed to patients, literally shut down, on so many occasions- first due to “COVID-19 outbreak”s amongst the staff, now due to unspecified “staff sickness”-that I have thought that they will probably just close up shop for good.

My hospital appointments are running many months behind the usual wait times. Every time I go in the staff members tell me all their colleagues are off sick and they are short of staff.

In both of these cases they have completely abandoned precautions, and no matter how often they have to close down, suffer illness themselves, delay treatment for their patients, infect their patients including “vulnerable” individuals with potentially fatal viruses, they just don’t seem, for the most part inclined to even so much as wear a surgical mask let alone a respirator mask FFP2/3 or N95/99 etc. Nope.


As for improved air quality, it’s like they’ve never heard of it. I assume that’s because all those who feel it’s important to tackle infection risk have given up beating their heads against the brick wall of denial, and left.


It’s so tragic.

We can’t help that a pathogens exist but we don’t have to sacrifice ourselves to them for no good reason when we actually have tools to reduce the damage.

 

I doubt it. If you go into shops full of people when you don't really need to, you're probably just exposing yourself to infection unnecessarily.

If you do pick up a virus that you've been inoculated against or already have immunity to, you might have no symptoms or only mild ones, but it's impossible to predict.

For instance, the recent Covid vaccines offered to older people here seem to protect them; most only have a cold-like illness when they eventually get infected. But a few still felt pretty awful, despite their jabs being up to date.

I had to make a similar calculation last year: which was likely to be worse, isolation or potentially getting Covid? For me it was the isolation, but it's a very individual thing. (For what it's worth, it's proved to be a reasonable decision so far—I've had Covid twice, but it only made me feel off-colour. I'd have carried on with normal activities if I hadn't had access to test kits that showed I was positive.)

 

Simple answer, No.

It sounds like something made up as a ruse to try to get you to get out more.

 

For many people, forgotten about people, complete isolation or as close to as possible is the only way to physically survive or to keep a loved one alive. Still sooner or later, almost certainly, physical necessity will require a break in the isolation. Medical emergency, medical maintenance, general practical requirements of a person.

It is also true that human beings are a social species. We need social interaction and variety. We need to physically be around other people. We crave the company of all of our loved ones and we like to spend time together in our wider communities. We are curious about new people we haven’t met yet.

The ‘it’s personal choice’ is so obviously false. What kind of choice is it to be given, to spiritually sicken and die from loneliness and isolation, or to physically sicken and die from how little society cares to take very basic bare minimum measures to protect you from suffocation or other organ failure?

 

Yeah I heard that about engineers and climate change. I’m not saying believe everything any engineer says.

But it is true that while medical bodies were claiming we needed trials to see if the masks everyone had been wearing for decades to prevent particles getting into their bodies via the nose and mouth, were worth it, the engineers involved in building ventilation safety measures and work places health and safety measures were putting out well referenced information, complete with diagrams on why ventilation and air filters HEPA and respirator masks were used and necessary and effective measures to reduce transmission.

I resent people’s attitude towards masks. But I think it has a certain logic, driven by our societies eugenicist ideologies and the conditioning for conformity rather than madness.

Masks that reach the standard to prevent transmission can be pretty uncomfortable (not so uncomfortable as a respiratory infection but still) and any piece of cloth “face covering” is a reminder that there is danger in the air. This is frightening to people. People are frightened of being frightened. But people are still scared. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so angry or resentful towards people still wearing masks. I think people just wanted to believe that the pandemic was over so very much, and that’s what the governments and corporations also wanted them to believe. I don’t think it’s insanity so much as people not wanting to go up against the capitalist system that has declared the emergency over, cause people know the odds are stacked against them if they do. So they’ve accepted the bribe in exchange for endangering themselves, and the pay off is you can do whatever you like now, no social responsibility. It’s annoying when people undermine this by continuing to act like we’re all being put at unnecessary risk, by say continuing to mask up.

Also people do trust healthcare authorities a lot and these have all been very involved in pushing the falsehood that we’re all fine now vaccines are available for some people. So this comes into play and helps suppress peoples doubts or concerns.

I guess I mean it’s sort of logical in a way to just go with the flow, if you can, it doesn’t pay not to. Quite literally in this case as people are often banned by their employers from wearing masks.

 

Well I think there are people who are responsible for the air quality in many environments and they don’t want to pay for clean air.

I think everyone wants to breathe clean air. We are all also conditioned to breathing polluted air. Because we don’t get a choice in the matter.

Unfortunately instead of seeing this pandemic as an opportunity to push back harder for better living and working conditions some people who could of opposed this situation (union bosses, liberal media cough cough) were just like “Oh well what’s one more deadly virus on top of everything else?!.” Shrug. Everyone else was forced to deal with it or starve.

 

Its completely bonkers what a lot of HCPs say. And also people who are scientists. People close to me are all for the 'multiple small exposures' thing, I think its folk lore, an 'old wives tale', stemming from a misunderstanding of the very complicated process of viral load/replication etc.

I also think that people tell themselves what they need to in order to tolerate what theyre having to do. I say its much easier to turn up to work, with all those unmasked snotty coughing people if you think that.

 

Yeah I do think people were genuinely traumatised by being told that they literally couldn’t breathe around others without posing a threat to others lives. That they in turn couldn’t be around another living breathing human without being themselves in mortal danger.
Thats fair enough. It was traumatic.


But it is very unfortunate that the majority response to such experiences hasn’t been to prioritise keeping each other safer when we are all in proximity as we want and have to be. But instead to just pretend super hard that it’s all fine now. The biological reality has simply evaporated away or something?

 

During the early stages of the pandemic, the messaging was that you could be within 2m of someone with Covid but needed 15 minutes of exposure to catch it, IIRC. I thought that was to do with viral load.

Am I misremembering it, or is that an accurate memory but the info is rubbish?

 

It was certainly touted about by Boris et al (or Vallance or whomever) - the authorities at the time - that you were much more likely to become infected if you spent more than 15 mins with an infected person. I do remember that you are right, there were charts on the BBC news website showing how much more likely it was with different times indoors/outdoors, closer than 2 mtrs & more than 2 mtrs etc.

But that was back when they were also saying it wasnt 'airborne' and that it was mainly only a problem for 'the vulnerable', and all kinds of other twaddle. I think half of what wha said then & now is unreliable - not being political there just saying there's a lot we dont know & a lot of what was said at the time was 'best guess'.

I would i imagine it to be true that the longer you were breathing in a person's exhaled viral particles the more you would inhale. But what happens after that I dont think is well researched or proven.

It seems like a complex mix of viral load & individual immune responses, otherwise you wouldnt have people living in houses full of the coughs, sneezes and breath of infected and symptomatic people, for days, and their inhaled viral load from that must be huge , esp if they sleep in same bed, but they dont even catch it, let alone get ill. But then you have people catching it from 30 seconds at the door from a delivery driver. So ISTM that it cant be as simple as exposure time alone.