why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
People are saying that viruses don’t try to kill people and they’re half correct. A virus doesn’t care if it kills its host or not, it only cares about passing on to the next host before it kills its current host. There’s generally a balance to this. A virus that’s too aggressive will kill its host too quickly and it won’t pass on its genes. A virus that’s too mild won’t replicate enough to spread before the immune system finds it and kills it. Ideally (in an evolutionary sense) a virus will replicate enough to be very infectious but not so much that the host is likely to die before it spreads. How it dies after spreading is irrelevant to the virus—whether the immune system eliminates it or it dies because the host dies, it’s successful if it spread to new hosts before its end.
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