While our mathematical models assumed continuous reactivation of T cells to avoid overfitting of the experimental data, extended analyses investigating the effect of periodic viral bursts on the ability to maintain the inflationary CD8+ T cells revealed similar findings concerning the necessity for different viral stimuli during acute and latent infection: To generate and maintain the inflationary CD8+ T cell response either viral reactivation patterns in terms of frequency and burst sizes and/or T cell mediated viral clearance rates have to change in comparison to the acute infection phase. Here, CD8A is linked to infection.