Beijing: Studies into clusters of Covid-19 cases show that contaminated cold-chain food products are the major cause of the outbreaks, highlighting the need for protection of workers within the industry, experts said.
“Research has indicated that the virus can survive on cold-chain food and packaging during long distance shipping and may cause human infection, in particular to high-risk people such as dockworkers, ” said Liu Zhaoping, a researcher at the China National Centre for Food Safety Risk Assessment.
“But the likelihood of food-to-human transmission is lower than other routes of transmission.”
Investigations into the source of the outbreaks in cities across China, including Beijing and the port cities of Dalian, Liaoning province, and Qingdao, Shandong province, found many of them could be traced to workers at cold storage areas, seafood processing plants and markets selling imported frozen food products, he said.
Retracted article
FreshFruitPortal.com has retracted an article published on Feb. 4 regarding the risk of transmission of Covid-19 via frozen foods. Having reviewed the article, we concluded that the information did not comply with our editorial standards.
The article cited information originally published on the website China.org.cn, which claimed that multiple studies had found that frozen products have been linked to outbreaks of Covid-19.
However, most international food safety organizations state that there is no evidence of Covid-19 transmission through frozen foods, and we have been unable to independently verify the validity of the studies mentioned in the article.
Studies into the clusters of COVID-19 cases in recent months show that contaminated cold-chain food products are the major cause of the outbreaks, highlighting the need for protection of workers associated with the industry, experts said.