Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow.

A virus is a very tiny type of germ that can make you extremely sick. Viruses only can survive in the living things. Viruses can cause many different types of infectious diseases including the common cold, flu and smallpox. Viruses take over living cells and make many copies of themselves. These new virus particles go on to infect other cells, When our body is being affected by a virus, our immune system kicks into action to stop or slow it down. At the end of 2019, the world came across a new type of virus called the Coronavirus (COVID-19). We have known about and studied coronaviruses for decades, but COVID-19 was a new strain to humans. COVID-19 is much more serious than the common cold or flu. It spread far and wide from March 2020, causing a pandemic, but timely invention of vaccines has stopped the outbreak of the pandemic.

The word 'infect' is similar in meaning to——.