On Monday, New Zealand officials reported nine new cases of COVID-19, adding a probable case, all similar to the Auckland group. There are 123 active infections and another 151 people connected to the group have been transferred to a quarantine centre in Auckland, adding another 82 positive people and their circle of family contacts, officials wrote.
“To date, despite extensive border testing, complete paintings in our isolation facilities, we have not yet been there to find out what happened here. We keep looking,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at a news conference on Monday.
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Researchers in Singapore and Ireland published a study on bioRxiv last week, exploring the option of a persistent infectious virus in imported foods as a credible explanation for the virus’s resurgence in Vietnam, New Zealand and parts of China. The exam is not certified in pairs.
The team added SARS-CoV-2 to cubes of sliced salmon, poultry and red meat from Singapore supermarkets and kept the samples at 3 other temperatures (4 degrees Celsius, 20oC and 80oC) and harvested them at specific temperatures. (1, 2, 5, 7, 14 and 21 days after inoculation), the authors wrote.
They discovered that the food was still infected with the virus 3 weeks later in refrigerated (4-C) and frozen (-20C and 80C) samples.
“When SARS-CoV-2 was added to pieces of chicken, salmon and red meat, the infectious virus did not decrease after 21 days to four C (standard cooling) and 20C (standard freezing),” they wrote.
“We know from overseas studies that, in fact, the virus may remain in some refrigerated environments for a while,” Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s leading fitness officer, told The Associated Press in mid-August.
However, Officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) have said in the past that there is no explanation for why to worry about the option of contracting the virus through food or food packaging.
“People aren’t afraid of food, packaging or food processing or delivery,” Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s fitness emergency program, according to Reuters, said this month.
Researchers in Singapore and Ireland have argued that the threat of transmission is minimal and that there is still the possibility of causing an epidemic.
“While it can be said with certainty that transmission through infected food is not a primary source of infection, the possibility of moving infected parts to a domain without COVID-19 and triggering an epidemic is a hypothesis,” they wrote.
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“It is to perceive the threat that one item will become infected and the rest at the time of export, and that the virus is presented in shipping and garage conditions,” they added.
Working situations in meat processing plants have been attributed to transmission of the virus due to prolonged close contact between Array’s poor ventilation, disorder and screaming, as the researchers also noted. Operations were temporarily suspended at meat processing facilities amid the pandemic in the United States because they were infected.
The study authors hypothesized that “with a higher viral load on inflamed personnel and the environment, contamination of meat with SARS-CoV-2 is conceivable during slaughter and processing”.
Chicken wings inflamed with the virus made headlines less than two weeks ago when a batch of frozen bird wings exported from Brazil to China tested positive for coronavirus. Several days earlier, Chinese officials in the city of Yantai had announced that the virus had been discovered in the packaging of frozen shellfish shipped from Ecuador.
Authorities sealed the products and those treated by shellfish were quarantined and tested negative, the government said.
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Researchers in Singapore and Ireland said their lab paints show that the virus may cope with the weather and temperatures related to shipping and garage situations for foreign food trade.
“We believe it is conceivable that infected imported food can transmit the virus to staff and the environment. An inflamed food handler has the potential to become an index case of a new epidemic,” the test authors wrote.
With respect to the outbreak of the virus in New Zealand, some of the infections were reported to staff at the Auckland Americold facility and surface tests were reportedly conducted last week.
“Our findings, together with China’s reports on sarS-CoV-2 detection in imported frozen poultry and shrimp packaging equipment, alert the food protection government and the food industry to a ‘new normal’ environment in which the virus arises. “Traditional threat to food protection,” the authors examined wrote.
Madeline Farber, Greg Norman, Peter Aitken, Bradford Betz and Fox News’ Associated Press contributed to the report.