Dormancy isn't really proper biology jargon, the correct term for what I referred to above is latency. However, outside of the cell, neither of those terms mea

Dormancy isn't really proper biology jargon, the correct term for what I referred to above is latency. However, outside of the cell, neither of those terms mean anything. A virus outside of a cell does nothing, period. It is essentially a USB flash drive with a computer virus in it. Saying a USB flash drive can "lie dormant in a drawer for days" is just silly. > Heck, may find out that frozen good with contaminated packaging can put the viruses into dormant mode and when you take them out of the freezer, and temperature and humidity level kick it into life. We won't though, because we thoroughly understand how these things function. There are things that function like that: bacteria.