China detects COVID-19 virus on pomfret fish exported from India

Coronavirus samples were detected on frozen pomfret packets exported from India to southern China as per a Hindustan Times report. The report further adds that the recent findings has led to the sealing of cold storage areas and nucleic acid testing for the local staff at the port. 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.

China, however, has said 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. The packaging was initially imported from Bremen in Germany to Tianjin and from there to the city of Dezhou in Shandong province. Earlier, China had suspended fish imports from an Indian company for one week. The decision was made by the Chinese Customs office after it detected novel coronavirus on three samples taken from the outer packaging of frozen cuttlefish. In September of this year, China isolated coronavirus contamination on packages stored by a seafood importer. This was discovered during an examination of Covid-19 outbreak in the Chinese city of Qingdao. It was only in October that the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a statement saying that contact with frozen food packaging contaminated by living new coronavirus could cause infection.