BEIJING (Reuters) – The eastern Chinese city of Jin said it had found new coronaviruses on meat and tripods from Brazil, New Zealand and Bolivia, and on packaging for these products, as China tested them on frozen foods.
The importers were a unit of the Guatemalan International Group <002091.SZ> And the Shanghai Zongli Development Trade, Jinan Municipal Health Commission said in a statement on its website late Saturday night.
The entry ports were the Yangshan Port customs of Shanghai and the customs of the outer ports. The statement from the city of Shandong province does not name the company sending the products to the companies.
More than 100 people who could interact with contaminated products and other related personnel have tested negative for the virus that causes COVID-19, it said.
Chinese officials last week found coronavirus on packaging of Saudi shrimp in Lanzhou city, Brazilian beef in Wuhan city and packaging of Argentine meat in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces.
China is the world’s top meat buyer and Brazil and Argentina are its biggest suppliers.
Zhengzhou, the capital of central China’s Henan province, discovered the coronavirus on the outer packaging of frozen pork from Argentina on Friday, local officials said in a statement on social media platform WeChat late Saturday evening.
The positively tested samples came from a 24-ton batch of frozen pork that was shipped from a cold storage facility located in Qingdao port to a warehouse for the Xingzhou city market.
The batch was found to be contaminated during the investigation before the goods could enter the warehouse.
The World Health Organization says the risk of seizing COVID-19 from frozen foods is low, but China has repeatedly sounded alarms since it discovered the virus on imported food products, rather than triggering an import ban.
(Reporting by Shivani Singh and Roxana Li in Beijing; edited by William Mallard
