Until they show full genome sequencing of a novel strain under controlled conditions, I’d assume this is contamination or a crappy primer set. If you’re running

Until they show full genome sequencing of a novel strain under controlled conditions, I’d assume this is contamination or a crappy primer set. If you’re running a bunch of PCRs, especially of the same thing, there is a good chance of environmental contamination from older sample (shipping containers labs for testing have split partitions because of this). There has also been times reported where there has been primer contamination at the synthesis company because they were also building SARS-CoV-2 controls. Also, there is a very easy way to figure out if it’s real - why didn’t they just Sanger sequence the outputs of the RT-qPCR? Such a simple experiment.