system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are viruses so much harder to kill than bacteria?

With the rise of CoVid-19 there are tons of news reports about the fact there are no medications for this virus. Obviously we have tons of antibiotics, but why are antivirals so much harder to develop?
gpt
Antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with the bacteria’s metabolism. They usually sabotage the creation of new bacterial cell wall resulting in the cells to burst, or they mimic nutrients that the bacteria gobble up but ultimately cannot use, so they starve.  
  
Viruses are not bacteria. They barely fit the definition for ‘alive’ and lack any sort of metabolisim that we can exploit. Put a virus in front of you and it will just sit there, completely inactive.  
  
A virus particle only consists of a little bit of genetic information (DNA or RNA) and a protein hull or sheath. That’s it.  
  
Viruses only activate by coming into contact with a living host cell. Their genetic information then enters the cell and reprograms it so that it now produces many more virus particles.   
  
And that’s the difficulty. Since they don’t have their own, discrete metabolism there is next to nothing that can be sabotaged that doesn’t also affect the host.  
  
Basically, if we want to find drugs against viruses we have to find one for each virus type or family separately (and hope that is doesn’t mutate and then drug becomes useless).  
  
That is a VERY long process and we haven’t had much luck yet.  
  
HIV drugs are now around that cannot remove the virus, but can force the virus into a sort of inactive state as long as the drugs are taken. HIV positive patients now have a near normal life expectancy if they adhere to the therapy.  
  
Tamiflu was created for influenza viruses. The idea is that it inhibits an enzyme that new virus particles need to detach from their host cell, so now thy can’t infect new cells.  Nice in theory and some countries stockpiled it for severe outbreaks but it turns out that the drug is next to useless.  
  
Acyclovir is used against Herpes (zoster) infections quite effectively.  
  
That’s it. Among the thousands of viruses that we have and that affect us, that’s the best we can do at the moment.