Hello everyone, I'm Abby Carlson.
I am an infectious diseases doctor
here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
And today we are going to talk about viruses.
We talk about viruses a lot in healthcare,
but people often have questions, like, what exactly is a virus?
What does it look like?
How does it work?
When you know a little bit about viruses,
we can understand why certain things we do in infection control
work to stop them from spreading and from making people sick.
And even if you're already pretty familiar with viruses,
you may need a way to explain it to other people when they ask you questions,
so we're going to help with that.
Let's talk a bit about the basics.
Viruses are one of the many types of germs that make us sick,
but we're talking specifically about viruses
because the disease COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2, a virus.
It is a new virus in a family called the coronaviruses,
and that's why we talk about COVID-19 as coronavirus disease,
because this new virus belongs to that family.
Viruses aren't really a living thing like an animal is,
and this is a big topic of debate,
and we don't have time right now to talk about it on this video,
but they are able to use living things like animals and people
to make copies of themselves
and then they keep spreading from one living thing to another.
Viruses actually only have a couple of parts.
All viruses have genes, just like we have genes,
and those genes contain all the information needed to make more virus copies.
You can think of these genes like an instruction booklet
or the blueprint of the virus.
They're the thing that needs to be read in order to make more viruses.
Viruses also have proteins, again, just like we have proteins.
Most of the proteins in a virus come together to create a shell.
The technical name for this is a capsid,
and that shell protects those blueprint genes from getting damaged.
Some proteins stay inside the shell,
and they only come out when it's time to make more copies of the virus.
Other proteins stick out from the shell and those proteins are special
because they help the virus get around the body and also from one person to another.
Some viruses -- not all but SARS-CoV-2 is one of them --
some have another layer on the outside of that shell called an envelope.
And this is just like the envelope in the mail that protects the letter inside of it.
The envelope for the virus protects the genes inside of it.
And it is made of some fats with some protein mixed in.
It also, like the shell, has some proteins sticking out of it.
And just the same as the shell,
those proteins are used to help the virus get around the body
and help it get from one person to another.
So, we'll talk about this fatty envelope again
when we talk about hand hygiene and environmental cleaning,
because with cleaning, we destroy that envelope protecting the virus
and prevent it from making more copies of itself, which prevents it from spreading.
So, now that we know what a virus is,
we can talk a little bit more about how it travels between people and makes us sick,
which can help us understand what we need to do in infection control
to stop this from happening.
We'll cover all of that in the next episode.
So be sure to follow up with us on Facebook or Twitter.
There on Facebook, we have, in the comments, a picture of a virus
that can help you follow along with each of these parts that we've described,
and we'll be giving out new notifications of new episodes as they're released.
So check us out there online at CDC.gov/ProjectFirstline
and we will see you with the next episode.
Bye everybody.