To address this question, consider the delay time that describes how long it will take, following the start of infection, for virus progeny to be released from infected cells (left). Analysis of such growth curves for more than 100 viruses indicate delay times from less than 100 to more than 10,000 minutes or about 1 week (middle). Infection delay times correlate with host cell doubling times, based on data from viruses that infect bacteria (blue), archaea (green), and mammalian cells (red). All times are in minutes. For details, see Jin and Yin, 2021.