CoachInfection runs in stages, each with its name:
- transmission: the pathogen travels — touched surfaces and hands, coughed droplets, contaminated food and water, blood, and the sexual route Definition 59.2 flagged;
- entry: through a breach — cut skin, or the body’s open doors: airways, gut, and the routes above;
- multiplication: warm, wet and fed, the arrivals divide — bacteria by Proposition 42.8’s conditions-rule, hours doubling their numbers; viruses by turning cells into copy-shops;
- disease: symptoms — from the damage itself, from bacterial poisons, and partly (next chapter) from the defense’s own battle.
Examples
Example 69.5 (Two invaders, contrasted)
The cut’s bacterium against the winter’s cold virus. The bacterium: enters the breach, multiplies between cells in the warm wet tissue, its wastes poisoning the neighborhood — the throb and pus of a septic finger. The virus: rides a droplet to the airway lining, enters the lining cells themselves, and each hijacked cell releases a crowd of copies before failing — the raw throat and streaming nose of its trail. Different mechanics; the antibiotic that starves the first cannot touch the second, for the second borrows your machinery, and drugs against it are hard to aim.