More evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a fairly harmless virus

This is a recent, much talked about research article in preprint (see e.g. here, here)!

This study fully confirms what a relatively harmless virus SARS-CoV-2 actually is. This was already known latest around mid 2020. Otherwise, would you deliberately expose 36 young volunteers if the virus was dangerous? Most likely not! 

Why were such human challenge studies especially on young adults not conducted much earlier like in the first half of 2020? Because medieval superstition, irrationality, panic and hysteria ruled! Too many incompetent lifelong career politicians dominated! Too many so called experts in science, medical profession and bureaucracy had their own agendas!

Why SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 is a relatively harmless disease and why the cure was worse than the disease.

"According to the world’s first “human challenge trial” study in which healthy young volunteers were deliberately infected with the virus. ...

The 36 volunteers, all aged 18-30, were exposed to a low dose of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus in the nose. [Only] Half of the participants developed covid symptoms, and became infectious within just two days ..."

"Scientists deliberately gave people COVID — here’s what they learnt

Only half of participants who were exposed to the coronavirus developed infections, most with mild symptoms. ... Nearly half of the participants who received a low dose of virus did not become infected, and some of those who became infected had no symptoms. ...
Human-challenge studies have been used for decades to study influenza, malaria and numerous other infectious diseases. Some researchers argued in favour of conducting such trials with SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of the pandemic, as a way to accelerate the development of vaccines. But others saw challenge trials as too dangerous to be acceptable, when so little was known about the virus and few, if any, effective treatments were available. ...
The trial, led by researchers at Imperial College London and a Dublin-based commercial clinical-research organization called Open Orphan and its London-based subsidiary hVIVO, was announced in October 2020, and the first participants were exposed to the virus in early 2021. Volunteers received £4,565 (US$6,200) for their participation, which involved at least two weeks of quarantine in a high-level isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London. ..."

From the abstract:

"To establish a novel SARS-CoV-2 human challenge model, 36 volunteers aged 18-29 years without evidence of previous infection or vaccination were inoculated with 10 TCID50 of a wild-type virus (SARS-CoV-2/human/GBR/484861/2020) intranasally. Two participants were excluded from per protocol analysis due to seroconversion between screening and inoculation. Eighteen (~53%) became infected, with viral load (VL) rising steeply and peaking at ~5 days post-inoculation. Virus was first detected in the throat but rose to significantly higher levels in the nose, peaking at ~8.87 log10 copies/ml (median, 95% CI [8.41,9.53). ... There were no serious adverse events. Mild-to-moderate symptoms were reported by 16 (89%) infected individuals, beginning 2-4 days post-inoculation. ...  Thus, in this first SARS-CoV-2 human challenge study, no serious safety signals were detected and the detailed characteristics of early infection and their public health implications were shown."

Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 human challenge | Research Square (open access)