In its recent claim, the country speculated to be the birthplace of COVID-19 has said that the frozen chicken wings sent as a part of the import from Brazil are infected with the coronavirus. As such, customers interested in buying frozen meat in the Shenzhen area of China are requested to take the utmost precautions while bringing the chicken wings home.
For the test, the surface of the meat has been taken into account as opposed to the cases reported from other parts of the nation where the test results came by testing the surface of the packaging boxes and packets of the frozen food substances rather than the meat itself.
According to the registration number announced in the statement, the local government said that the meat belonged to the aurora Alimentos Company, a plant situated in the sour then state of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Tests were conducted on people who consumed the product, including those who had contact with the one in question and other related items. The results came negative much to the relief of the people.
The local government’s statement further urged consumers to stay wake of the things they buy, especially imported frozen products and seafood.
In another city of China that falls under the Shandong sector, Yantai, the government said through its Weibo official account on 11th August that three packed items from the imported food received tested positive for the virus.
According to a television broadcaster’s report from the state province of Anhui, China’s Wuhu found COVID-19 positive test result in the sample collected from the outer cover of a frozen chicken wings pack which came from Ecuador, a South American country.
Several other state media news reports the detection of viruses from the outer packages of imported seafood in various areas of China, ranging from the eastern coast’s Shandong province to the municipality of Chongqing located in the west.
However, health authorities and world bodies like the WHO and US’s CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) have said that its “highly unlikely” for anyone to get infected through food. The CDC reported the risk from packaging and food products or its bags to be “low”. They said that the prime mode of transmission is through talking, sneezing, or coughing, which refers to respiratory droplets. The bodies did not rule out the chance saying that if a person touches a contaminated surface first and then his mouth, eyes, or nose, he may get the infection. Still, very unlikely as there hasn’t been solid evidence of the same.
The World Health Organization said, “There is no evidence to date of viruses that Coronaviruses cannot multiply in food; they need an animal or human host to multiply.”
According to David HuiShu-Cheong, a respiratory medicine expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the virus has most probably got contaminated with the food items while packing it. He pointed out that these need not be “infectious” even then as the nucleic acids present in the test could be latching on to the remnants of RNA from the already dead virus. These RNA particles have previously too found guilty for reporting false-positive test results in recovered patients of South Korea.
For the virus to become potentially infectious, those collected would have to be grown in man-made laboratories. He further noted that coronavirus can still persist and continue to live despite severe cold like the freezing temperatures of storage and remain alive and active even after the product gets warmer.
