Why is a virus considered dead (and bacteria alive)?

Question

I think the title explains itself.

Thanks for the help!

EDIT: I know they are not alive, but can be “de-activated”, my bad for expressing myself in a bad way.

In: Biology

Answer 1

Not super clear. Concepts such as life and death were proposed and used when people wanted to differentiate a dog from a stone but ~~wince~~ since more knowledge has been gathered, the distinctions are not that clear cut.

A concept of life that was used in biology was that something was alive if it could interact with its medium, grow and replicate by itself.

The problem with viruses is that they cannot reproduce by themselves, they need a host to infect and make the host produce more viruses, therefore they don’t comply with the definition.