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?

Question

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

Answer 1

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