Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
What if this was a virus we couldn't recover from or our bodies couldn't kill off completely? We would be so fucked. I don't get how we have some viruses that stay in our bodies for the rest of our lives while others our immune system can kill.
|
You have to understand what viruses are and how they work.
First of all, unlike bacteria, viruses are not "alive". They are not a "life form". By themselves, they are inert bits of nucleic acid (either RNA or DNA but not both), often enclosed in some kind of "coat", usually protein.
To reproduce, they have to enter and take over the functions of a host cell, either in humans or some other species. Again, typically the coat of the virus contains molecules that are able to link to the surface of cells and allow the virus to penetrate, inject its nucleic acid into the host cell and from there it begins to use the cell's machinery for nucleic acid reproduction (often ultimately resulting in the death of the cell when a new generation of virus particles are released).
The classic virus that goes "dormant", herpes, does this by remaining inside the host cell, usually a nerve cell. It is able to periodically turn on the machinery of its own reproduction inside the cells which results in creation and ejection of a burst of new virus particles. Each time this happens, the body does respond with the panoply of the immune response and eventually the body suppresses the virus. This is why your herpes sores go away. But by then the virus has entered new cells and gone dormant there, hidden inside the cell from the factors of the immune response . . . until the next time it decides (to anthropomorphize a bit--we don't understand all this totally) to break out.
But not many viruses are able to pull off this trick and other coronaviruses don't so there's little reason to think SARS-CoV-2 does. Most likely the seeming recurrence of positive tests or actual illness in some patients thus far has been due to testing error--that is, they never really had gotten well before they seemingly relapsed and tests indicating they had were wrong.