If the actual sample has never been isolated, how do you guarantee that the string you posted matches the so-called “real” virus?
“If the actual sample has never been isolated, how do you guarantee that the string you posted matches the so-called “real” virus?”
The joy of science is it is replicable and testable.
Take a nasal swab of someone with Covid, sequence it, and you will find a version of this genome.
Take a swab of someone without Covid (which includes any samples from pre-2019) and these sequences will not be found.
This is an easy test to do, and since every major hospital in the world can do this work, is has been done more than a million times so far.