How much does all the SARS-CoV-2 in the world weigh?

A group of researchers recently calculated that each infected individual carries about 10 billion to 100 billion individual SARS-CoV-2 particles at the peak of their infection. That suggests that all of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses currently infecting people around the world — which has been about 1 million to 10 million infections at any given time during the course of the pandemic — have a collective mass of somewhere between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms). Small doesn't mean insignificant, however. "Taking a view from a larger historical context, from the standpoint of leverage, an atomic bomb is less than 100 kg [220 Ibs] of fissile material," senior author Ron Milo, a professor in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and co-lead author Ron Sender, a doctorate student in Milo's lab, said in an email to Live Science. "And yet, look at the destruction that is wrought."