[jl6]

It does sound suspiciously like wishful thinking though, doesn’t it? You can’t sample all parts and all fluids of someone’s body all the time. Maybe trace undetectable levels of the virus can be transmitted, and of course they are going to look like a “no transmission” case if you lack the ability to detect that amount of virus. And that’s either not a problem (if trace levels = no symptoms), or a ticking time bomb waiting to find a host with the conditions that would enable mass viral replication back up to detectable levels.

[vsef]

There is no such thing as a trace/undetectable transmission. These studies have been going on a long time now with large numbers of participants, replicated in multiple countries/different populations. The results are very strong and not based on measuring viral levels.

[lixtra]

> You can’t sample all parts and all fluids of someone’s body all the time. Maybe trace undetectable levels of the virus can be transmitted…

You don’t need to be a 100% sure. Once the risk becomes small enough you can spend your time worrying about other risks.

[jl6]

Now that may be entirely the right posture, but the triple equals signs in the post upthread did rather imply certainty.

[austhrow743]

I took that to just be because we’re on a programmer heavy site rather than an extreme display of certainty

[whimsicalism]

The standard you are applying is literally not possible to imply anywhere.

Hell, an HIV viron could be created spontaneously through quantum tunneling in your body with some non-zero probability. I think it would be legitimate to triple equal signs that to "not going to happen" though.

[hashimotonomora]

Risks like these are orthogonal and additive. There’s no reason to discard any risk but to hedge them.

[tomp]

Activity-based risks are not additive.

Time spent driving is not time spent having sex (well, hopefully).

So if risk(dying while driving) ~ risk(dying because of sex) ~ 0, you can easily ignore both of those.

[hashimotonomora]

Be careful. The infinite sum of epsilons over an infinite domain and over the time domain can and usually does converge to a finite value in real life.

Also, you can avoid having sex with a HIV-positive person. You can probably not avoid driving. So the fact that a risk may be low is not sufficient to take such risk if you can hedge against it.

[Retric]

It is because everyone dies relatively quickly that you can ignore ultra low risks. Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be?

Meanwhile doing some once a day with a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of possibility killing you in 40 years just isn’t worth considering.

[mlyle]

> Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be?

Depends what your quality lifespan is. If I get sick of everything, that time isn't worth much.

There's also a "time-value" of life.

Cool stuff I can do today may be worth a lot more to me than things I can do 500B years from now. Especially since the person that would be doing them is someone I cannot identify with at all.

[dtgriscom]

risk(dying while (driving while having sex)) >> 0...

[throwaway22032]

We feel fairly comfortable in stating that HIV is not transmissible surface-to-surface despite the mathematical fact that strictly there is some miniscule non-zero chance that it could be, this is basically the same thing.

[inglor_cz]

You need to transmit a certain amount of HIV particles to cause infection. It is called inoculum. In normal sex, it is quite a lot, I wasn't able to find an exact number, but it is in tens of thousands in ther least.

The vast majority of virions seems to be killed by the immune system before they can actually take hold.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...