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Contact with coronavirus-contaminated frozen food containers could cause infections, China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Saturday.
The CDC detected and isolated the active coronavirus in a frozen code packet during efforts to detect the virus in an outbreak reported last week in Qingdao City, the agency said on its website.
The finding suggests that the virus can be transmitted long distances via frozen products, the authority said.
Two Qingdao residents, who were initially diagnosed as asymptomatic in September, brought the virus to a hospital during quarantine due to insufficient disinfection, leading to another 12 hospital-related infections, authorities said last week.
However, the latest CDC statement does not show strong evidence that the two Qingdao workers removed the virus from the package and then contaminated the food they handled, said Jin Dong-Yan, a professor at Hong University. Kong.
The CDC said no consumer had been found to have contracted the virus through contact with frozen food and the risk of it remained very low.
However, the institution recommended that workers who handle, process and market frozen products avoid direct contact with products that could be contaminated.
Staff should not touch their mouth or nose before removing potentially contaminated clothing without washing their hands and should be tested regularly, the agency said.
Before the latest CDC findings, genetic traces of the virus were found in some samples taken from frozen food or food packaging, but the amount of virus was low and no live virus was isolated, the agency said.
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