It has not been isolated and the PCR tests, as well as the vaccine, were developed using sequences derived from China's data.
What I want to know is… If no one has isolated it - then how do we know its RNA sequence? If China hasn't isolated it… How do they know?
There are methods which insist they can sequence a virus without isolating it, but personally - I don't buy what they are selling as they can be sequencing almost anything from destroyed bits of cell and nucleotides to bacterial bits caught in the mix.
But if you are a medical student, eyes full of wonder at the magic of modern science and technology, being taught that a process can reliably sequence a virus from a tissue sample - you do not get taught or look into the many nuances which allowed a team to claim that process worked and prove it against standards set before… Nor how the way it has been adopted and transplanted makes the results extremely suspect and no one is bothering to go back and do the hard work to check using the old way.
So, my question is… How much of this is just using a bad testing process and bad sequencing process… Perhaps knowingly biased by bad initial data … To create panic over what would otherwise be standard seasonal colds?
Personally, I am of the opinion that our methods and source data are so bad that we couldn't tell a leaked lab virus from the seasonal cold viruses … If we could even tell what seasonal cold viruses one has with any kind of reliability.