According to a British mathematician, all COVID-19 virus particles spreading death and misery around the world would fit into one Coke can.
Kit Yates, a numbers expert at Bath University, found that there are about 2 quintillion – or 2 billion billion – SARS-CoV-2 particles in the world at any one time, Sky News reported.
But because of their miniscule size, if you rounded them all, it would only be “a few bites”.
“It is amazing to think that all the troubles, disruption, hardship and loss of life that have resulted in the past year can only be a few bites,” said Yates.
Describing his infinitesimal calculations, Yates said he used the diameter of the viral particles – an average of about 100 nanometers, or 100 billionths of a meter – and discovered the volume of the spherical virus.
Even considering the telltale peak proteins and the fact that the particles leave holes when stacked on top of each other, the total is still less than in a single 330-milliliter can of Coke, he said.
“When asked to calculate the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 in the world for the BBC Radio 4 show ‘More or Less’, I have to admit I had no idea what the answer would be,” Yates wrote. in The Conversation.
‘My wife suggested it be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. “Either that or a teaspoon,” she said. “It’s usually one or the other with questions like this,” he added.
According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 2.35 million people have died from COVID-19 to date, and more than 107 million confirmed cases worldwide.
In the US, the death toll is close to 472,000 and there are approximately 27.3 million confirmed cases.