Can COVID-19 Be Transmitted By means of Frozen Meals Shipments?

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This 7 days, the Planet Wellbeing Group finished an investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Scientists there feel the coronavirus might from time to time be transmitted by shipments of frozen meat and seafood. The WHO says that assert requirements a lot more research. But what does the science say? Really should we be concerned about our frozen foods in this article in the U.S.? NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff reports.

MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE: Following COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan previous winter season, China isolated the town and mostly obtained the outbreak beneath management across the complete country. Then, in the summer months, the city of Beijing, about 700 miles from Wuhan, saw a massive outbreak.

PETER DASZAK: For China, a massive outbreak, I really should say.

DOUCLEFF: That’s Peter Daszak. He is a disease ecologist at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. He is also portion of the WHO workforce investigating the pandemic in China. The outbreak in Beijing had extra than 300 circumstances, and Daszak says it was centered all over a substantial wholesale current market.

DASZAK: In Beijing named the Xinfadi sector that was promoting chilled meat and frozen meat, such as fish, some of it imported from outdoors China.

DOUCLEFF: Now, this marketplace isn’t really like your community grocery retailer. It can be huge. It really is 12 million square toes, or even larger than 200 football fields. Inside of, staff move substantial pallets of frozen meat and seafood in bulk and then ship it to suppliers throughout Beijing. Daszak states Chinese researchers looked for coronavirus all in excess of the industry, specifically on significant frozen offers.

DASZAK: It is a fantastic little bit of detective work. And what they found have been coronavirus on the deals of food and, in a couple of conditions, inside of the offer, suggesting it was the place the meals was packed.

DOUCLEFF: But Daszak suggests no 1 appreciates accurately how the virus bought into this bulk packaging. Was it any individual who packed the frozen food, any individual on the dock that been given it? Was it in the seafood itself? He says the Chinese imagine frozen shipments like this have caused several outbreaks in China in the past year. So now the WHO crew is on the lookout to see if that could also be the source of that extremely initial outbreak last January at a seafood market in Wuhan.

DASZAK: It was a seafood market place. There was certainly frozen and chilled foods there. But there was a good deal else going on as nicely. So all of which is likely to get looked it.

DOUCLEFF: And what they locate, he says, will ideally supply clues to the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Now, I know this all sounds a little bit frightening, and it goes towards what experts have been telling us for a few months now, that you get COVID from the air and you really don’t require to wipe down food items offers. So what gives?

Emanuel Goldman is a microbiologist at Rutgers New Jersey Professional medical College. Initially off, he states, the scenarios in China were being joined to industrial shipments of frozen foodstuff – shipments off docks. This is a unique natural environment and one very distinct from individuals a normal buyer would be in. This is not your individually packaged frozen food items you locate at the grocery retail store.

EMANUEL GOLDMAN: They have not experienced any studies of people – even suspicion of people becoming contaminated by this route.

DOUCLEFF: And second, even less than these quite precise ailments, with industrial-scale shipping, Goldman suggests transmission via this route is incredibly uncommon.

GOLDMAN: It can be so uncommon as to be of negligible value in the real environment to most individuals.

DOUCLEFF: And so do you consider this is a thing that, like, just could transpire, but it really is like you’d be more most likely to gain the lottery?

GOLDMAN: Which is a really great analogy. It is quite unlikely that you would get anything at all coming from food items. This is a virus we get by respiration.

DOUCLEFF: And so, Goldman suggests, the original advice stands. You do not want to wipe down your frozen pizza box or dress in gloves when you go to get frozen fish sticks.

Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR Information.

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