(Reuters) – Beijing’s Xinfadi market, which was linked to a coronavirus outbreak in June, has suspended sales and storage of cold-chain and aquatic products, state-backed Beijing News reported.
Several infections in recent months in Qingdao and Tianjin cities involved handlers of imported frozen food.
Refrigerated meat, seafood and frozen products in the market were disposed, and the market has disinfected over a hundred cold storages and shut down their power, Beijing News reported on Wednesday.
Workers in a particular environment who repeatedly come into contact with cold-chain products polluted by the coronavirus might be infected without proper protection, a Chinese official said earlier on Wednesday.
However, officials cautioned that the risk to consumers of catching the virus from cold chain food products was “very low”.
China has ramped up testing of frozen foods after saying it has repeatedly discovered the coronavirus on imported products and their packaging, triggering mass scale testing of food and related personnel, suspension of certain imports and disruptions to trade flows.
(Reporting by Colin Qian, Roxanne Liu and Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Toby Chopra and Michael Perry)
