Viruses elicit long-term adaptive responses in the tissues they infect. Understanding viral adaptions in humans is difficult in organs such as the heart, where primary infected material is not routinely collected. In search of asymptomatic infections with accompanying host adaptions, we mined for cardio-pathogenic viruses in the unaligned reads of nearly one thousand human hearts profiled by RNA sequencing. Among virus-positive cases (~20%), we identified three robust adaptions in the host transcriptome related to inflammatory NFκB signaling and post-transcriptional regulation by the p38-MK2 pathway. The adaptions are not determined by the infecting virus, and they recur in infections of human or animal hearts and cultured cardiomyocytes. Adaptions switch states when NFκB or p38-MK2 are perturbed in cells engineered for chronic infection by the cardio-pathogenic virus, coxsackievirus B3. Stratifying viral responses into reversible adaptions adds a targetable systems-level simplification for infections of the heart and perhaps other organs.