system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does repeated exposure to COVID after initial exposure increase the severity of sickness?

I’ve read that viral load seems to play a part in severity of COVID infection, my question is this:

Say a person is exposed to a low viral load and is infected, then within the next 24-72 hours they are exposed again to a higher viral load. Is there a cumulative effect that will cause this person to get sicker than they would have without the second exposure? Or does the second exposure not matter as much because they were already infected and having an immune response at the time?

Thanks.
gpt
There is evidence that suggests that repeated exposure during your initial infection could lead to an increase in the severity of your symptoms. As you said the term "viral load" is extremely important in order for us to understand why the virus hits some people harder and others not so much and we know that for a couple of reasons. Our immune system doesn't have as much time to deal with infected cells as their amount increases. The bigger the viral load the more cells become infected and the more the virus replicates and that's a poor prognostic factor. We know that for a fact based on how the current pill (paxlovid) for covid works, it disables a protease that allows the virus to properly replicate thus it REDUCES the viral load. If you take paxlovid days after the initial symptoms then its effect becomes insignificant and it's basically not nearly as useful. The same goes for another pill knows as oseltamivir (for the influenza virus) which also doesn't allow for proper replication of the virus inside our cells thus it reduces viral load and leads to a less severe infection. Also the covid infection is a biphasic infection which means it has 2 parts. The virulant part (first 7 days) and the inflammatory part which leads to what we call "covid pneumonia" today. The higher your viral load is during the initial infection the stronger of an immune response your body will induce which is more likely to lead to an extreme autoinflammatory response.

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So in short, yes repeated exposure increases viral load and viral load leads to worse symptomatology and possibly triggers the second inflammatory phase of the covid infection.