How Small Are Viruses?

've already talked about bacteria, and now we know that they're very, very small. They're so small that there are no microscopes that you and I could conceivably buy that would enable us to see a bacterium.

A staphylococcus bacterium—they live all over us and rarely cause trouble until they become food poisoning or the dreaded necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease—and oddly enough, probably the source of a small infection that's taking place on my foot as I type (and causing intense pain)—is a fairly typical bacterium, so let's take it as our example.

How small is a single staphylococcus? Well, if you assembled, say, 100,000 of them—if they were human beings, that would be roughly the number that would fit into the Melbourne Cricket Ground, being the tenth-biggest stadium on Earth—well, they would all easily fit in the punctuation mark known as a period "." with no trouble at all.

Okay, are you getting a picture of roughly that size?

Check out the flu virus (blue)

Well, the staphylococcus happens to be shaped like a sphere—coccus in ancient Greek means "grape"—but if it were an E. coli, the one most of us have heard of that causes food poisoning (although E. coli live inside our guts in huge numbers usually causing no problems at all) they're more shaped like torpedoes, but they're still small enough that 100,000 of them would comfortably fit inside a "." .

So let's blow up one of those E.coli until they're the size of a Boeing 747. You know how big a 747 is, right? It's the biggest passenger jet ever built—it seats 500 people, when you have a full flight.

So now a bacterium is the size of a 747 passenger plane. And if that bacterium was a passenger plane, how big would a human being have to be?

What the fuck is wrong with you?? Are you nuts? Pretty fucking big—let's just go with that.

Now: imagine you're going on a trip, but you're going to bring your cat. So you put your cat in a little carry box and you put it in the 747. The cat is a virus . . . about the same size as, say, a single virus of the influenza species.

Now check out the Staphylococcus bacterium (purple). The flu virus is that little blue thing next to the green rabies virus.

So now imagine getting infected with coronavirus.

Now when they talk about "micro droplets" or "micro-particles," you're still talking about Olympic stadiums-worth of size compared to the actual virus. Millions and millions of actual viruses can be contained in a single micro-particle . . .

Our only consolation—or perhaps it's just our most horrific realization—is that viruses aren't alive, in the sense that we understand life. They're more related to minerals than they are to animals . . . try to imagine that: that you're being infected by a bunch of very, very tiny rocks, because that's really what they are.

So how different are viruses from bacteria?

1. Viruses can't move. They don't have arms, or hairs, or wheels, or anything else. They're inert. They go wherever the current of fluid or whatever medium they are in dictates.
2. Bacteria can move. Just like their (gigantic) brethren, insects, bacteria come in an array of different appendages; cilia (hairs) flagella (the name means "whips," but it just means arms—or feelers. (Eww.) But some bacteria don't have any appendages and don't move.

We tend to forget that at the scale that bacteria and viruses exist, mediums like water appear more like a gel, or syrup, if not quicksand. And creatures as small as bacteria and viruses exist in air that for them is more like water is for us. In short, existence at that scale is an unimaginably different experience than it is for us at our scale.