The lifecycle of a coronavirus involves binding to host cell receptors, incorporating viral RNA into the cell, using host ribosomes to create viral polymerase, making a complementary RNA strand, using host ribosomes to make viral proteins, assembling new viruses using host membranes, and releasing new viruses from the cell.

“what you can see here is this is the coronavirus that we described it has a lipid membrane into which are inserted various proteins which will bind to receptors on the surface of host cells and then the RNA from the virus is incorporated into the cell now remember the RNA from a corona virus is a single strand of RNA and it's a positive strand ... the first thing that ladder does when it gets into the cell that RNA material is it makes it uses the host ribosome to make a protein and that protein it makes is a viral polymerase and that viral polymerase makes the complementary strand of that RNA ... basically the RNA from a corona virus gets into our cells it uses our machinery to make a protein that that protein then makes a complementary strand for the single strand of the RNA in the corona virus now it's a double stranded RNA or there's both a positive and negative strand RNA in our bodies from the virus this is separate genetic material from humans and those again use our intrinsic ribosomes to make proteins the proteins of the virus so the virus basically makes itself in our cells then it uses our membranes to make new viruses and then those viruses are released from our cells”