[nonbel]

>"an infected person produces billions of virus particles every single day... The oft-cited rule of the thumb is that every base of the viral genome is mutated every day"

Isn't it pretty weird that, despite this massive diversity, infections seem to be only caused a single, or sometimes a few, distinct virus particle(s):

>"we show that 78% of infections involved single variant transmission and 22% involved multiple variant transmissions (median of 3)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19193811

To me that means something is horribly wrong with our understanding of HIV.

[Fomite]

Note that not all of those genomes continue to persist. People often have a single dominant strain, but what exactly that strain is varies wildly over time.

[nonbel]

I'm saying that a person must be getting exposed to millions or billions of variants, and only one leads to an infection. That is very surprising to me given my understanding of viruses.