Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but it's still preferable to receive a smaller dose of the virus. Could you explain why you believe that? I haven't found anything definitive on this topic.
[I'm no microbiology expert, so obviously take this with a grain of salt :-).] I'm not sure whether the initial dose affects the severity of the disease, but it seems clear that it at least affects the probability of infection. The individual action hypothesis [1] posits that each individual pathogen has an independent chance of infecting a host, i.e. P(no infection | n pathogens) = P(no infection | single pathogen)^…
With an exponential curve, whether you start off with 10,000 or 100,000, given that it takes about 2 weeks for our adaptive immunity to kick in, the virus is going to be in the hundreds of millions in either case.
[I work in vaccines, but not as a scientist, so I'm just trying to absorb as much as possible here..]