The current human speed record happens back in 1969, when astronauts who flew Nasa’s Appollo 10 mission went back from a lap around the moon, they have reach the speed of 39,897 km/h, more than 40 times the speed of a regular commercial flight. This is snail’s speed compared to the speed of COVID-19 if you put everything at the scale.
COVID-19 virus size varies from 60 to 140 nanometers (one nanometer being one billionth of a meter).
During the pandemic it tooks only about 6 months for the virus to spread all around the globe, using us as the fastest available vector. It is interesting to see that the nature always find the best solution to concquer the globe, with our technology we are the fastest living entity on earth. So that’s not surpising that some virus jump from one specy to us as it ensure for them the optimal spread’s speed. Without suprise it should happen again in the future. That’s evolution & adaptation.
So 6 months to browse 20,106 km all around the epicenter in China and the globe is fully covered. With a commercial flight it took for us less than 24h so you will say “Well, where is the prodigy ?”
Let’s scaled for fun, this distance compared to COVID-19 size is about a factor of 10¹⁴ , meaning 100 thousand billions !
If we apply this factor to the average human size (1.65m), it is like we travel in 6 months 237 billions of km, which is 54 time the distance between Earth & Neptune our most distant neighbor in Solar system.
For comparison, Voyager, the spatial probe, needed 12 years to reach Neptune.
At the scale, COVID-19 need only 80 hours, still far from speedlight (5%, 4 hours) but very impressive.
The scaled COVID-19 spread’s speed becomes almost 55 millions Km/h, i.e. 1,375 time faster than our record.
Not bad for few protein molecules..
