Size of Life

Maybe it's a stupid question, but how does the poliovirus "work"? Like at this scale, the DNA strand is still pretty visible and a decent-ish percentage of the polio virus in size.. is it just a ball with DNA inside and not much else? How does it pack enough DNA to replicate itself into it's own size at that scale?

You’re pretty close actually. It’s a single strand of positive-sense RNA 7.5kb long, and a protein capsule. +ssRNA is treated as mRNA by the host and is directly translated into proteins.