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BEIJING: Chinese health officials said on Wednesday (November 18) that two cold chain storage workers in the port city of Tianjin were infected with COVID-19 as the country shifts its focus to contaminated imports after a series of sprouts related to frozen foods.
Workers in hazmat suits were poring over food shipments in a country that has largely controlled domestic infections but now blames imports for the resurgence of local infections.
Massive testing campaigns have been implemented following reports of traces of coronavirus in imported food and packaging, and state television shows workers cleaning food transport trucks with disinfectant and inspecting packages of frozen salmon.
In Wuhan, where COVID-19 first appeared late last year, authorities said on Friday they had detected traces of the virus in frozen meat from Brazil.
Four more cities reported last week that imported food samples, including frozen Argentine pork and Indian cuttlefish, tested positive.
READ: China’s irritated trading partners reject COVID-19 food testing
Customs inspectors across the country have so far analyzed more than 800,000 samples of refrigerated imports and suspended shipments from 99 foreign suppliers, senior customs official Bi Kexin said at a press conference last week.
Authorities have stepped up detection since traces of the coronavirus were found on equipment used to process imported salmon after an outbreak in June.
In Tianjin, officials said the two infected workers “had previously had contact with contaminated cold chain food products.”
Customs data in September showed that China’s meat imports had risen by more than 70 percent this year as the country’s food supply was disrupted by swine fever and heavy flooding that destroyed tracts of land. agricultural.
The World Health Organization said that “there is currently no evidence that people can contract COVID-19 from food or food packaging.”
The transmission of COVID-19 between countries in frozen foods is “possible, but it has not been studied exhaustively, so we do not know the extent of this spread,” Paul Tambyah, president of the Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infection, told AFP. from Asia Pacific.
Detection has intensified after the latest outbreak in Tianjin, just over 112 kilometers from the capital Beijing, linked with food transport workers, amid mounting fears of a second wave in winter.
READ: China’s Tianjin To Test Food Cold Storage Sites After Confirmed COVID-19 Case
Earlier this month, China banned visitors from countries like the United Kingdom and India and increased testing requirements for travelers from several others.
State media has also increased claims that imported food could have been to blame for the initial outbreak in Wuhan, where the virus was first linked to a seafood market.
Beijing insists the source of the initial outbreak remains a mystery and that it may not have originated in China, a claim that countries from the United States to Australia vigorously dispute.
The Foreign Ministry also raised a conspiracy theory earlier this year that the US military may have brought the virus to Wuhan last year.
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