Thread by @Ayjchan

Been seeing rumors that the Covid-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) has never been isolated before. I'll post links and snapshots of some papers here to show that several different groups in different countries have each isolated the virus.

First is WIV Wuhan China..
nature.com/articles/s4158…

2nd Hong Kong, China (I know same country but different labs). tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

3rd example Guangdong, still China because that's where there was first access to patient samples.
jvi.asm.org/content/94/17/…

4th example Germany, thanks @klausenhauser for the tip!
nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
nature.com/articles/s4158…

5th example also Germany science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ea…

6th example Australia mja.com.au/journal/2020/2…

Could really come up with dozens of examples of the virus having been isolated from people sick with covid-19.

Here's one for fun. Tiger SARS-CoV-2, isolated in the USA:
mbio.asm.org/content/11/5/e…

8th example from Korea. I'm really just pulling these off Genbank by searching "SARS-CoV-2" and "Vero"... mdpi.com/2076-393X/8/4/…

Isolating a virus from a patient is often just taking fluids from a sick person and incubating it with cells in the lab that are capable of making more copies of the added virus aka culturing/isolating the virus.

Someone clarified to me that the claim isn't that the virus hasn't been isolated (although I've seen several people saying this) - but that SARS2 hasn't met Koch's postulates, in other words, hasn't been determined to cause COVID-19. This isn't correct. SARS2 does cause COVID-19.

One good example showing the virus does cause COVID-19 is this paper: patients diagnosed with covid > virus was cultured/isolated from patients > virus was given to hamsters (obviously not ethical to give it to humans) > hamsters showed COVID-19 symptoms.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

It's possible that some of this confusion comes from being able to detect virus genetic material in some people, but not being able to isolate the virus from them. That happens because you can still detect viral RNA often even after the patient has recovered.

I seriously didn’t think this was going to be such a controversial topic 😅 we need to have better science education matching modern times. A lot of people are still working with postulates developed in 1890. Please we need an updated education curriculum virology.ws/2010/01/22/koc…

Surprisingly, I could not find an appealing video of the story of Koch's postulates. Maybe @Kurz_Gesagt could attempt one? Someone💰 should sponsor them to make one seeing as how there's quite a bit of confusion about how scientists in 2021 determine if a pathogen causes disease?

The main thing to understand is that the Koch postulates were developed in the 1800s. Yes, at the time they were the gold standard (although Koch also said there were serious shortcomings even at that time). But we're in 2021 now. We can't be using postulates from 1800s.

If you see videos of doctors or scientists complaining that modern day science doesn't adhere to super old (more than 100 years old) scientific postulates... I think that person might be quite a bit out of date.

It's a poor reflection on the education system. Even when I learnt about Koch's postulates for the first time (as a teenager), the textbook ALREADY said it was super outdated and had a ton of caveats to it. That modern scientists had amended it to fit new scientific discoveries.

If you made a mistake thinking (or believing someone) that this virus hasn't been isolated, purified, and found to cause the Covid-19 disease, my suggestion is to just acknowledge the mistake and let it go.

It's a pandemic. Thousands of scientists are studying this virus.

You may as well be telling people in 2021 that elephants are fake and no one has ever seen one in real life before.

Maybe in the 1800s, you could've convinced a large majority of people that elephants are fake because most people would've never seen one before.

But not in 2021.