Humans don't grow, convert nutrients to energy, or reproduce independently.
Humans need every day about 30 organic substances that they cannot synthesize, so these substances must be obtained from bacteria, plants and other animals.
Due to having internal reserves, a human will not die immediately when isolated from other living beings, but only after a month or even slightly more. A month of independent life is not enough to grow and reproduce.
However a virus that is encapsulated in its transmission form will also not die definitively immediately, but it can survive for many years independently of any other living beings, i.e. much more than a human can live independently.
There is a huge complexity chasm between any bacterial cell and a virus, but there is also a huge complexity chasm between a virus and any mineral or any chemical substance whose synthesis is known to be possible in abiotic conditions.
There is no doubt that cellular living beings and viruses are 2 very different kinds of things, but both are also very different from any non-alive things.
There are many characteristics common for cellular living beings and viruses, so normally one would need a single word for both of them, to avoid enumerating both of them whenever a sentence is true for both.
The most convenient is to call both of them as living. Those who do not include viruses between living beings utter extremely frequently sentences that are either incorrect or incomplete, because they are true for both cellular living beings and for viruses, but the authors mention only "living beings" with the meaning "cellular living beings", even if those sentences are equally true for viruses.
If you call viruses as non-living, then you must also say that humans and most animals have among their ancestors non-living entities, because our genome incorporates genes that have been obtained from viral ancestors.
The concept of viruses as "non-alive" has been an overcompensation for the previous belief that viruses might be living beings like any others. When it has been discovered than viruses are very different from cellular living beings there has been a fashion to call them non-alive, to demonstrate that one is up-to-date with scientific knowledge and one knows that viruses are very different from cellular beings in many features, even if they are alike in others.
Unfortunately this phenomenon has been very frequent in the history of scientific terminology. There are plenty of examples when after some people had discovered that some things are more different from other related things than previously believed, they gave a new name to their discovery, claiming complete distinctness from what was previously known, even if the correct point of view was midway, i.e. even if the new things were distinct enough to be classified as something different, they also shared enough characteristics with what was previously known to be better considered as just a new subclass of those things.
Viruses are traditionally “not life” because they don’t grow, convert nutrients to energy, or reproduce independently.
(Some smart commenter will point out something, but there is some difference. The complexity chasm between bacterium and virus is huge.)
But applying a colloquial definition, they can be.