• Question: Hi Melanie! If there are over 200 different viruses that cause the common cold, would if be possible to be infected with several different colds at once?

    Asked by anon-256449 to Melanie on 1 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 1 Jul 2020:

      Hi Ella,
      Great to hear from you again and really cool question! 🙂
      In theory that is absolutely possible but its probably not very common. You may have noticed that if you had a cold yourself that you don’t get another one for a few weeks even if you are around people who have one. That is because your body activates the immune system and it is on higher ‘alert level’ right after a cold and even while you still have your cold and your immune system kicks in (usually on day 1 or 2 of your symptoms).
      So in order to be infected with multiple cold-viruses at once, you would have to be exposed to different viruses on the same day and while there are many different viruses that cause the common cold (most of them are part of the rhinovirus class) they don’t often exist in the same area at the same time. What mostly happens it that one strain ‘goes viral’ (crappy pun I know 😉 at one time and that is than the strain everyone in that area gets sick from.
      Side note: This is also why the flu vaccine often doesn’t work very well. There are so many flu strains that its very hard to say in advance which one will be the one that goes viral each season and you need to make a quest in advance in order to prepare the vaccine early.. but if you are wrong you made the vaccine against the wrong strain.

      It could of course be that someone from a different area with a different cold virus just happens to be in the same place at you and another person with a different cold virus. Then you might catch both.. even though the odds are small.

      If you do have both viruses they would infect likely separate cells though, because of a concept that is not fully understood yet that is called ‘superinfection exclusion’. This phenomenon makes it very hard to infect a cell with two different viruses at once but we don’t quite know yet how it works. But technically it could be that in one part of your e.g. lung tissue you have virus A replicating and in another one virus B. 😉

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