eli5: If viruses aren’t living organisms like bacteria and parasites, how can it be airborne? Viruses can only survive in the body, so how can it be lingering around outside of the body?
In: Biology
They’re not “alive” but they do have different degrees of robustness depending on their preferred method of transmission.
Some are very fragile and cannot survive even momentary exposure to atmospheric oxygen and sunlight. Others are more protected by layered shells and can last for a while out in the wild before they degrade.
They don’t die since they weren’t alive, but they can chemically or physically break from harsh conditions and lose their infectious ability.
If it helps – since viruses aren’t alive, the term ‘dead’ doesn’t really apply to them. I believe the work used is ‘deactivated’
Like everyone else said, viruses aren’t necessarily alive, so they don’t necessarily die. Also, some viruses can “survive” in different conditions than others. For example, there are viruses emerging from melting polar ice caps.
Explaining like your five: some viruses are like Captain America and can live fine in ice in suspended animation. Not all viruses got the same serum. Some “die” rather quickly in other conditions
It’s still a matter of debate as to whether or not viruses can be considered alive. While viruses are capable or locomotion and reproduction, they lack almost every other trait that we typically would use to define something as alive. It’s easiest to go over point by point
1) Reproduction:
Before viruses were discovered, being able to reproduce was an easy metric to determine if someone was alive. While viruses are able to reproduce, they’re unique in that they can only do so by forcing cellular organisms into producing more viruses. Because viruses can’t reproduce on their own, something which even parasites can nominally do, they can’t be considered alive by this standard alone
2) DNA/RNA:
Viruses posses genetic instructions like every living organism does, so by this standard alone they could be considered alive.
3) Everything else:
We don’t have a clear cut definition for what defines something as “alive”. There’s a number of factors which could be used to say something is alive, and viruses consistently manage to meet some standards we could use while failing to meet others. It’s a lot of tiny details I don’t think are worth dropping, but the ultimate focus is that viruses basically manage to break the rules of every classification system we try to fit them into, and their relation to the rest of life and in evolution isn’t even clear, hence why we can’t really say they’re alive or not confidently
Who said they can’t exist outside a body? they do.
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