Samples of coronavirus were detected in frozen packages of butterfish exported from India to southern China, Chinese customs said on Wednesday, leading to the sealing of cold storage areas and nucleic acid testing for local personnel at the port.
The latest detection comes a week after authorities suspended imports from an Indian company after the virus was found in three packages of cuttlefish.
Experts say that it is not unusual for frozen packages to have traces of Sars-CoV-2 if handled by an infected person, although that would be an unlikely route to infect more people; it would depend on a complicated series of events.
However, China has said that in early November a worker at a refrigerated warehouse in the city of Tianjin, near Beijing, became infected with Covid-19 after handling pork imported from Germany.
The packaging was initially imported from Bremen in Germany to Tianjin and from there to Dezhou city in Shandong province.
On October 17, the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) had announced that it had isolated active Sars-CoV-2 in packages of imported fish linking it to a recent outbreak in Qingdao city.
Even if the links are unclear, the Chinese government has stepped up controls on imports of frozen meat and seafood, testing hundreds of thousands of frozen packages for the virus.
Official data available until September 15 indicate that by that date, a total of 2.98 million samples had been analyzed in the 24 provincial-level regions of the country, including 670,000 taken from food or food packaging from the cold chain , 1.24 million of the workforce and 1.07 million. enviroment.
Whenever the virus is detected in frozen packages, China has suspended imports from that particular company for at least a week.
It was during a similar check that local Chinese authorities on Wednesday reported two new cases of cold chain imports contaminated by coronavirus, with two packages of Indian frozen pomfret and a packaged sample of Russian frozen salmon tested positive for the virus, General Administration China Customs. it said in a statement Wednesday.
The batch of Indian pomfret entered the country through the port of Fuzhou in the Fujian province of eastern China.
A total of 2,500 packages were transported to a cold storage facility on Sunday.
According to the Chinese CDC, there are still 2,117 pieces in stock and 383 pieces have been sold.
“All related goods have been sealed and have not entered the terminal market,” said a state media report.
The report added that all involved cold storage workers, cold storage personnel, and related contacts were placed in central isolation and medical observation after nucleic acid testing.
The statement did not provide details of the Indian exporting company.
Also on Wednesday, Chinese customs announced that a nucleic acid test on a packaging sample of frozen salmon imported from Russia came back positive.
Last week, three packages of frozen cuttlefish imported from a Kolkata-based company tested positive for the coronavirus.
State media reports said it was not the first time frozen foods imported from India had been found to have the virus upon arrival in China.
Earlier this month, packages of frozen furtail, a fish, tested positive in Taiyuan, the capital of northern China’s Shanxi Province.
The coronavirus was also detected in packages of meat and seafood imported from other countries, according to state media reports.
“China earlier reported two cases of imported frozen products contaminated with coronavirus on Sunday, one in Sishui, East China’s Shandong Province, and the other in Xi’an, Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, raising the number of contaminations by cold chain viruses to at least 10 provincial regions in the country since June, ”reported the Global Times tabloid on Wednesday.
Since June, more than 10 provinces and cities, including Beijing, Liaoning, Anhui, Fujian and Jiangxi, have discovered positive samples for coronavirus taken from frozen food or imported food packaging.
China’s State Council issued guidelines on November 9 on cold chain food disinfection regulating that imported frozen products must be traceable and go through closed-loop management throughout the export process.
As of Wednesday, nearly 3,700 imported cases of Covid-19 had been reported on the continent.
The total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases stands at 86,369, while the death toll was unchanged at 4,634.
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