NEW DELHI, Nov 18: China, that had reported the first Corona case in the world exactly a year ago, is claimed to have detected Coronavirus on two packets of frozen pomfret fish exported from India and one salmon packaging exported from Russia, Chinese customs department said on Wednesday.
The department said the Corona imported fish packets were received in southern China and the authorities promptly sealed the cold storage areas and put the local staff on the port on nucleic acid test. The latest detection comes a week after authorities suspended imports from an Indian company after the virus was found on three cuttlefish packages.
Experts say that it isn’t unusual for frozen packages to have traces of the Sars-CoV-2 if handled by an infected person, though that would be an unlikely route to infect more people – it would depend on a complicated series of events. But China claimed that earlier in November a worker in a refrigerated warehouse in Tianjin city near Beijing was infected with Covid-19 after handling pork imported from Germany.
On October 17, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control (CDC) had announced it had isolated active Sars-CoV-2 on packs of imported fish linking it to a recent outbreak in the city of Qingdao.
Even if the links are unclear, the Chinese government has stepped up checks on frozen meat and seafood imports, testing hundreds of thousands of frozen packages for the virus.
According to the official data, a total of 2.98 million samples had been tested across the country’s 24 provincial-level regions by September 15 including 670,000 taken from cold-chain food or food packagings, 1.24 million from working staff, and 1.07 million from the environment.
Whenever the virus has been detected on 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 reported two new cases of coronavirus-contaminated cold-chain imports on Wednesday, with two Indian frozen pomfret packages and one Russian frozen salmon packaging sample tested positive for the virus.
The batch of Indian pomfret entered the country at Fuzhou port in eastern China’s Fujian province. A total of 2,500 packages were transported to a cold storage facility on Sunday of which 2,117 pieces are still in stock, and 383 pieces sold.
“All related goods have been sealed up and have not entered the terminal market,” a state media report said.
The report added that all involved cold storage workers, cold storage staff and related contacts have been put in centralised isolation and medical observation after nucleic acid testing.
No details of the exporting Indian company were given in the statement. Last week, three frozen cuttlefish packages imported from a Kolkata-based company tested positive for the coronavirus.
State media reports said that wasn’t the first time that frozen food imported from India was found to have the virus upon reaching China.
Earlier this month, packages of frozen hairtail, a fish, tested positive in Taiyuan the capital of Shanxi province in north China.
The coronavirus was also detected on imported seafood and meat packages from other countries, state media reports said.
(Manas Dasgupta)
