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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaScience

Coronavirus: China’s Covid-19 origin theory includes pig heads and frozen fish

  • WHO investigation team puts forward cold-chain transmission as a lead despite scepticism
  • Beijing has used the theory to support its claims that the virus may have not originated in China

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Imported Australian beef at an Ole supermarket in Shanghai in January. Many Chinese shoppers grow reluctant to buy overseas food products after Covid-19 infections were reported among people handling such items. Photo: Bloomberg
Simone McCarthyandLinda Lew

China’s health authorities have repeatedly said they are finding the Covid-19 virus on frozen food imports and have linked infections in the country to pig heads and seafood.

While some researchers and health authorities have raised doubts about frozen food as a virus transmission route, Beijing has suspended imports of products and introduced checks, tests and disinfection of packaging and containers, creating delays that clog ports and irk trading partners.

Several top Chinese scientists have further suggested that the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 disease may have arrived in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan city, the location of the world‘s first known outbreak, via frozen food imports, or what’s referred to as cold-chain transmission.

That theory featured prominently in a press conference in Wuhan on Tuesday, where an international team of WHO specialists presented the findings of a month-long probe into the origins of the virus alongside Chinese officials.

“Sars-CoV-2 can persist in conditions found in frozen food, packaging and cold-chain products,” said Liang Wannian, the National Health Commission official who led the Chinese side of the mission.

Liang also suggested the virus might have caused infections overseas before the outbreak in Wuhan but that they were not identified. Beijing has repeatedly stressed throughout the past year that just because the virus was first detected in Wuhan it may not be where it emerged.

The doubters

Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University Medical Centre in the US, said the frozen food route did not seem like a “very likely legitimate explanation” and would warrant comparative studies.

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