>>12533317they dont. its like saying cars replicate, when its a factory churning them out. a virus needs cells from an organism to duplicate, each cell is such a factory. the analogy would work better if those factories would have a scanner which could take apart the car and build an exact copy of it, without realizing its not supposed to do so, since the car it scanned has major design flaws, making it unintentionally build car bombs instead. a virus is not an organism, it has not the capability to replicate. its misfolded protein chains which represent a building plan of itself, will make a cell do copies of it, if the virus happens to get that protein into the cell, overwriting its regular reproduction routines
