Ten Nonillion Particles and Five Million Incidents:
Thinking in COVID 19 Time

In this essay, Raqs Media Collective frames COVID‑19 through a scalar lens, noting that an estimated 10³¹ (ten nonillion) viral particles float in the air at any moment—making viruses the planet’s most abundant “bad news” relative to human ‘newsworthiness.’
By juxtaposing this microscopic ubiquity with five million documented pandemic incidents, the text underscores how a seemingly invisible entity can reshape global social and biological networks. Through these reflections, Raqs probes how the agency of “unliving” particles forces a reconsideration of presence, scale, and our sense of life’s boundaries.

Text by Raqs, published by the Goethe Institut, 2020