This is interesting. My understanding was always that the viral RNA is seen as RNA coming from the cell's DNA, and the cell's protein assembling machinery would assemble a virus according to the virus' RNA. You're saying that the virus' RNA actually has the cell's machinery assemble a virus factory "replication complex"?

Presumably in the replication complex, there's some molecule producing viral RNA. Does it do that by looking at and copying the original strand of RNA (or copies)? If not, then was the RNA production machine built "knowing" how to make the viral RNA? I'd think that involves some compression, which is what I'm most curious about.

What I mean is that if each base in the injected RNA specifies exactly one base of the produced RNA, then there aren't any bases left in the injected RNA to specify how to build anything but an identical strand of RNA. It seems like there must be something more efficient going on, and I'm interested in what it is from an information science perspective.