system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does herpes work? Why/how does it occasionally make wounds appear, and why cant we just kill it/won't it just die?
gpt
After the initial infection, the virus lives dormant in nerve cells and can periodically reactivate. 

It does a few things to evade your immune system, like interfering with a process that normally allows virally infected cells to tell white blood cells, "hey, I've got a virus inside me. Come kill me!" It also interferes with other processes that would normally cause the infected cell to die.

When it's hanging dormant inside your cells, it's just a little loop of DNA floating around inside them. Lots of viruses are very difficult to kill because of this. Most antivirals are designed to interfere with virus's ability to replicate in some way but destroying a segment of viral DNA or RNA without damaging your cells' DNA/RNA is pretty challenging to do.