Dr here. viruses mainly work by invading a cell to hijack a cell's machinery to make more copies of themselves. The body mainly responds in 3 ways macrophages, nk cells, T cells.

1. macrophages can identify infected cells, eat them up and isolate them. once eaten, they introduce acid- like particle to digest everything inside the compartment including viral particles

2. nk (natural killer cells) - will act by finding an infected cell, come up to it and do 2 things. I. insert a coded message called granzymes into the infected cell. these things tell the infected cells to suicide by self-digesting themselves. This again breaks down everything inside the cell into harmless soup. (the garbage cleaners of the body, neutrophils come later to pick these floating dead trashbags up later) II. they can also shoot out perforins. these particles attach to cell membranes, poke little holes into it, compromising the cell membrane integrity (think of it has popping a balloon)

3. cytotoxic T cells do the same thing NK cells do. granzymes and perforins.

• so bottom-line, Viruses all get digested by cells, broken up into harmless pieces of protein.

1. some of these broken down protein are used by the immune system to better identify and target viruses
2. some proteins are recycled (protein is protein, the gains baby =D)