About 800 million viruses descend everywhere on planet Earth on a daily basis

The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.

Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space (nytimes.com).

The foregoing excerpt is from an April of 2018 article from the New York Times titled: Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day. The article is by Jim Robbins. I wanted to share this information since two years after the article was written, we are faced with a pandemic due to a virus. I also find it mind boggling that so many viruses fall down to our planet constantly. Read the full article at the link below.

Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day - The New York Times: Viruses shape the ecology of the planet, but scientists still have only a rudimentary understanding of the microbial impacts on animals, plants and ecosystems.

Reference:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/science/virosphere-evolution.html