This is Why latent Viruses, such as herpes Virus, can go unnoticed from the immune system and persist for long periods of time.

More generally, the huge challenge exerted by the immune system on pathogen populations defacto generates apparent competition between different infection strains (or even species) co-infecting the same host [45].

Chronic infections accumulate much more diversity, in line with the hypothesis that they continuously evolve to evade the immune system [16].

Yet it is known that tumours can mutate immune-checkpoint networks to generate protection from the immune system .

through mutating the p53 tumour suppression gene), and escaping the patient’s immune system are key steps in cancer development [17].

Existing emergence models have not yet accounted for such within-host population feedbacks, especially those arising from the immune system .

While it is generally accepted that the immune system plays a key role in HPV clearance, we investigate here a mechanism which could be equally important: the stochastic division dynamics of stem cells in the infected tissues.

Combining mechanistic mathematical models at the cell-level with population-level data, we disentangle the contributions from immune system and cellular dynamics in the clearance process.

We find that cellular stochasticity may play an even more important role than the immune system .

Third, we assumed that the interactions between virus and immune system are independent of the specific HPV strains, and that there are no synergistic or competitive effects among co-infecting types, see also [51].

In other words, the stochastic dynamics contribute to as much as ~ 83% of the viral clearing mechanism in healthy individuals, and the contribution from the immune system is comparatively small.