Coronavirus in China: Cases linked to cold stores and port workers are a permanent mystery.
China has detected its first local asymptomatic infections in more than a month as two port workers tasked with unloading frozen seafood tested positive, adding to alarms that contaminated imports could transmit the coronavirus.
The two cases, found in Qingdao city, Shandong province, during routine testing of port workers, were the first symptomless infections reported by China since August 20. China has also not reported any local symptomatic infections since August 15.
Unlike other countries, China separates asymptomatic and symptomatic cases in its daily tally, and the former are transferred to the second category if and when they start showing signs of illness.
The new cases will heighten concern in China over whether the imported products are infectious. Traces of the virus have been found repeatedly on frozen and imported seafood and meat and on their packaging, as well as in the containers in which they were shipped.
China has banned imports of plants from Ecuador, Brazil and Indonesia in recent weeks after discovering the virus on their products, disrupting trade channels.
While the United States Food and Drug Administration has said there is no evidence that Covid-19 is transmitted on food or food packaging, Chinese researchers have found that the coronavirus on chilled salmon could be infectious for more than a week.
The growing number of cases related to cold stores and port workers is a continuing mystery. There were resurgences in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Dalian earlier this year, linked to people working with imported food products, but experts have not been able to say for sure where the infections.
In New Zealand, a 102-day streak free of local virus cases ended when a worker at a cold storage factory in Auckland fell ill last month. But officials said preliminary results of environmental testing at the plant refuted the theory that the transmission route passed through refrigerated surfaces on materials from abroad.
In Qingdao, the local health commission said 132 close contacts of the two patients had been quarantined and 129 of them had tested negative so far.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
