Elsevier

Biosafety and Health

Volume 2, Issue 4, December 2020, Pages 199-201
Biosafety and Health

Cold-chain transportation in the frozen food industry may have caused a recurrence of COVID-19 cases in destination: Successful isolation of SARS-CoV-2 virus from the imported frozen cod package surface

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bsheal.2020.11.003Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Fifty out of 421 cod outer package's surface swab samples were tested SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid positive.

  • SARS-CoV-2 was isolated successfully as CPE were observed and the whole-genome sequence was achieved.

  • SARS-CoV-2 resulted in the outbreak in Qingdao felled in a European branch, which originated in Europe.

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread in 220 countries/regions to wreak havoc to human beings around the world. At present, the second wave of COVID-19 has begun in many European countries. The complete control of COVID-19 is very urgent. Although China quickly brought the virus under control, there have been eight sporadic outbreaks in China since then. Both in Xinfadi of Beijing and Dalian outbreak of COVID-19, environmental swab samples related to imported cold chain food were tested nucleic acid positive for SARS-CoV-2. In this outbreak in Qingdao, we directly isolated SARS-CoV-2 from the cod outer package's surface swab samples. This is the first time worldwide, SARS-CoV-2 were isolated from the imported frozen cod outer package's surface, which showed that imported frozen food industry could import SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Keywords

COVID-19
SARS-CoV-2
Cod outer package
Frozen food

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1

These authors contributed equally to this work.