China focuses on frozen food in war to reduce virus risk, but experts remain skeptical

11/14/2020 Health, Science, World

But despite some of the world’s toughest border restrictions and quarantine measures, small, scattered clusters have continued to resurface.

In addition to incoming passengers, Chinese officials suspect the virus was brought in by another culprit – the importation of frozen food.

But China claims it has proved that it is possible to contract Kovid-19 with food packaging and that efforts to stop it are doubling down.

“More and more evidence is showing that frozen seafood or meat products can bring the virus from countries that have burst into tears,” Wu Zunyo, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese CDC, said this week.

Medical workers dressed in protective clothing collect samples of frozen beef imported for coronavirus testing at a food factory in Shanghai, China.

In the past five months, China has said it has found traces of coronavirus on shrimp from Ecuador, squid from Russia, fish from Norway and Indonesia, and frozen food products, including meat and chicken wings, from Brazil, or on their packaging. . But experts say Genetic fragments of the dead virus can be taken in China’s nucleic acid tests, which are no longer contagious.

Then, last month, when Qingdao discovered the source of the outbreak in the city, the Chinese CDC announced that it had discovered live coronavirus on the packaging of imported frozen fish – a discovery it said was “the world’s first.” “Confirmed that contact with live novel coronavirus contaminated outer packaging can cause infection.”

Further investigation

The Chinese CDC statement posed some unanswered questions. Qingdao officials said the outbreak was detected by two dock workers who tested positive, but the CDC did not say whether the workers transmitted the virus through a contaminated package or through other means.

Jin Dongyan, a virology professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the CDC had not provided concrete evidence of the transmission when such a possibility arose. He said workers could infect the virus from elsewhere and then contaminate the food packaging. He said the missing step would compare the genetic sequence of the virus among Qingdao workers and those handling food at a source of import.

“Each virus has its own traits. If they match we can say that there is a chain of evidence.”

However, the Qingdao authorities have stepped up inspections and ordered to check “every piece” of imported cold-chain products. Workers unloading, transporting and transporting these products were also ordered to be tested every three to five days.

The Chinese city of Qingdao tested more than 10 million residents in just four days following a small cluster of Covid-19 cases in October.

This week, Chinese authorities tightened procedures again after testing positive for the virus by workers at a frozen food company in the port city of Tianjin late last week.

The infection was discovered only after city officials were informed that a group of German pig nuclei imported by Tianjin had tested positive for coronavirus in a neighboring province. A truck driver attached to a cold storage facility has also tested positive.

On Monday, the Chinese government announced that all vessels importing refrigerated and frozen food must be disinfected before they can enter the market. The requirement includes both internal and external packaging of these products and the vehicles used for transporting them.

“We will safely implement preventive disinfection of cold-chain food imports at entry ports and strengthen inter-agency cooperation to prevent imports of Covid-19 through cold-chain food products,” said B.C., a senior official in charge of food safety. Said at a press conference on Thursday, at the General Administration of Customs.

Extraordinary measures are in addition to the extensive screening that has already been introduced.

As of Thursday, Chinese customs said it had stopped the import of 99 food companies from 20 countries where foreign factory workers are said to have signed the Covid-19 agreement.

Meanwhile, Chinese customs officials have begun testing coronavirus on frozen food imports, especially seafood. As of Thursday, they had conducted random spot checking on some 873,000 samples, 13 of which were said to have tested positive.

Companies whose products have tested positive face temporary import suspension, which lasts one to four weeks. So far, eight companies and six fishing vessels have been hit by the move.

Blaming imports

China became suspicious of imported frozen food after it erupted from Beijing’s largest wholesale food market in June.

Before that, Beijing had not had a local infection in 56 days. CDC chief epidemiologist Wu said at the time that the coronavirus was brought to market through the importation of contaminated seafood or meat or by an infected person, but an investigation was needed to reach a conclusion.

Xinfadi, Beijing's largest wholesale food market, was the epicenter of the city's coronavirus outbreak in June.

Four months later, Wu was much more certain. “The (Beijing outbreak) is the world’s first discovery and confirmation that new Covid-19 outbreaks will occur in other countries through contaminated food cold-chain transport,” he told the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on Tuesday.

Wu did not elaborate on how he came to the conclusion, but other Chinese scientists and health officials have also pointed to the importation of frozen seafood as a possible culprit in the outbreak.

In a study published last month in the National Science Review, a journal under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a team of experts, including the Beijing CDC, concluded that contaminated imported frozen seafood was a potential source of Beijing outbreaks.

Jin, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, remains a suspect. “This is a very weak paper. Nothing can be deduced from the study,” he said.

In China, however, health experts and the state media have quickly doubled in principle. Some even speculated that imports of frozen food may have had an early outbreak in Wuhan last December – claims Jin and other leading experts have dismissed as completely baseless.

Beijing orders importers to avoid frozen food from countries with large coronavirus outbreaks

Earlier, the Chinese media and officials promoted false claims that the coronavirus originated outside of China – as in the United States, to remove the blame placed on China for spreading the virus around the world.

On Chinese social media, amid growing concerns about stable food imports, some have vowed to suspend all such products. But the Chinese CDC says the risk to consumers is very low.

There are other factors in the game as well. Chinese experts have warned that a clear ban would make even the impractical potential volatile given the high demand for frozen products from Chinese consumers.

In 2019, China imported more than 8.8 million metric tons of meat and .2.5 million metric tons of aquatic products, state broadcaster CCTV quoted customs data as saying. To stabilize supply during the epidemic, imports have increased even more this year, with 7. million million metric tonnes of meat imported in the first six months alone, according to CCTV.

Is it possible to catch Covid-19 from food or packaging?

Coronavirus is most often transmitted from person to person through respiratory drops when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks. While it is technically possible to capture Covid-19 from food or packaging, experts say it requires a conversion of a series of low-probability events.

First, the infected worker may need to contaminate the food or its packaging with a sufficient load of the virus to infect it – possibly sneezing, coughing or screaming over it without a face mask.

After that, the virus should avoid long trips of international shipping and remain active on the surface while waiting to be unloaded and unpacked. From there, the food handler at the receiving end will have to touch the virus before touching their nose or mouth to become infected.

Why you should not worry about getting coronavirus from food

Previous studies have shown that the viability of the novel coronavirus varies from hours to weeks, depending on many factors, including temperature, humidity, and the type of surface it is on.

For example, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the virus could stay at room temperature on plastics and stainless steel for up to 72 hours, while another study in the Lancet found that the duration was up to six days. .

The virus, which can survive better in cold and dry environments, will remain intact as long as the temperature drops. “In general, according to other coronavirus studies, the coronavirus is very stable in the stable state, which has been shown to survive for two years at -20 ° C (-4 ° F),” the WHO said. According to the Lancet study, the novel coronavirus can survive in full laboratory conditions for more than 14 days at a temperature of 4 ડિગ્રી C (39 ફે F) – refrigerated temperature.

“Zero tolerance” approach

Dale Fisher, an infectious disease specialist at the National University of Singapore, studies how long the novel coronavirus can survive on refrigerated and frozen meat and salmon. Its findings will be used to assess the likelihood of an outbreak from imported food.

He said Workers working at the end of food transport should practice good hygiene by keeping their work surface clean and washing their hands frequently. But he doesn’t believe consumers are at risk of catching the virus from frozen or refrigerated food packaging, because every time the product is moved around or touched, the virus thins out.

“Because if that’s unusual for early food handlers, then at the bottom of the list, when it’s cleaned, cleaned, moved around, put on one shelf and moved to another shelf … when It will get very thin when it goes. Customers), ”he said.

In most countries, even if imported frozen food infects the food handler, it will not be reported due to large amounts in active cases, Fisher said. “You should only take note in countries where there are no cases,” he said.

In August Gust, when an epidemic ended a 100-day race without a New Zealand community transmission, experts and officials also suspected the virus had been introduced by frozen food, one of the reasons one of the earliest known carriers operates in a cold storage facility. But the investigation later denied the theory.

China, on the other hand, has doubled its checks on foreign shipments. Fischer said China-deployed comprehensive screening does not apply to other countries where the infection spreads.

“Clearly, in the US and Europe, food testing will not be fully utilized, as so many cases are spread by people.” “But China actually has zero tolerance towards Covid-19.”

“Even when millions of tons of food are circulating around the world, this is often an unlikely event.”

But even if there is such a risk, there is no need to ban food imports, according to Fisher.

“The intervention is only to ensure that the food source has received covid-safe measures so that the food cannot be contaminated.” “We’re not stopping sending food around the world.”

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