Coronavirus Found On Imported Frozen Seafood Packaging In China

Chinese authorities Tuesday discovered the novel coronavirus on the packaging of frozen seafood delivered from the port city of Dalian, located in the country’s northeastern Liaoning Province.

At least three companies in Yantai, a port city in eastern Shandong province, received the packages with traces of the virus present on the outer packaging. The Yantai city government said in a statement that the seafood was an imported shipment that "landed" in Dalian but didn’t mention where it originated, according to Reuters.

The city of Dalian has recently seen a surge of coronavirus cases, with at least nine cities in China, including Beijing, reporting cases linked to it in the past month. Many cities in the province of Liaoning, cities in the neighboring Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces and the southeastern province of Fujian discovered several cases traced back to Dalian, according to a report by the South China Morning Post.

Dalian customs officers found the coronavirus on shrimp packaging from Ecuador in July, prompting China to suspend imports from three Ecuadorean shrimp producers, according to Reuters. Some of the seafood purchased by the Yantai companies had been processed for export, while the rest has been kept in cold storage and away from markets. It was not known if any of the processed food had been exported.

The city government said in the statement that authorities had sealed off the goods and those handling them were quarantined and tested negative for the virus.

The novel coronavirus outbreak was suspected to have originated in a seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, which has since spread around the world, infecting 20,522,191 people worldwide as of Tuesday and killing 745,928, according to Worldometer.

China has as many as 84,737 confirmed cases as of Tuesday, with 4,634 deaths reported so far.