I heard that the sars covid-19 genome has around 30k nucleotides and mentioned to a friend that therefore you could fit the entire covid RNA data onto an old floppy disk! He disbelieved me and we bet a pint so I had to take a look a little further….
I found the genome data published (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947.3), and thought it would be fun to visualise the data as an image.
Here it is! 29,811 pixels representing the 4 different nucleotides which I coloured, (A)adenine = white, (C)cytosine = red, (G)guanine = green, (T)thymine = blue.
All of the data for covid in an image 173×173 pixels of 4 colours…
I’ve also learnt that covid uses compression for its rna, (as does the human dna) similar idea to JPEG’s 
There’s markers which specify how to unpack and interpret the code, like headers in computer code!
I was going to make an image of the human genome for comparison but yeah, the download for the raw data was >900GB…
It would be cool if we could use machine learning to reverse engineer the compression.. it’ll be far superior to any jpeg 
Also whilst in lockdown, I joined a facebook group called ‘Recreate artworks with things you find at home’, and enjoyed contributing my own Escher piece!