It’s a human thing to reduce huge concepts to a level we understand. Take time for example, which we compress to our experience of it. Some say this is why birthdays took ages to come around when we were kids. While years will fly past like months when we reach our seventies. We decided to have a go at understanding a virus on human terms and this is what we learned.
Our Baby Steps towards Understanding a Virus on Human Terms
A virus is a lump of genetic code that makes it tick, inside a container that protects it. We imagine this shield is as round as a ball to reduce it to something we understand, although there are other shapes. This code may be RNA or DNA depending on what it comprises, but that’s for scientists to ponder over.
The genetic code sits inside a protein shell virologists call a capsid. Capsids come in a variety of different shapes too. The outside of our ball encloses this arrangement. Lumps of protein arrange themselves symmetrically on the outside of this, and reach out to their host. That’s as far as we got to understanding a virus on human terms before we wanted to know how it works.
Our Tentative Attempt to Understand How a Virus Behaves
Viruses are solitary travelers. They don’t mate with other viruses, and they cannot reproduce themselves. Therefore, they have to get inside host cells to ensure the survival of their life form. However, this is not a one-to-all relationship. The Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus lives happily in humans but not in their dogs.
As soon as viruses get inside host cells, they harvest materials that make it possible for them to clone themselves. Sometimes, as is the case with the virus causing Covid-19 they can seriously damage their host organism. Viruses are not the same as bacteria and we can’t kill them with antibiotics.
Our only available option is controlling infections with antiviral medications as we search for a vaccine. We must slow the spread and flatten the curve while we wait for that to happen. Understanding a virus on human terms teaches us how to outwit its strategy. We must keep it away from us with face masks and social distancing, and it’s as simple and difficult as that.
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Preview Image: Structural View of a Coronavirus
