China announced this Friday, July 10, having discovered traces of coronavirus on packages of shrimp from Ecuador, in a context of concern about imports of frozen products. Samples from a container and packages of white Pacific shrimp tested positive for the new coronavirus in the Chinese ports of Dalian (northeast) and Xiamen (east), the Customs Administration said.
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Samples taken from inside the packages and from the actual shrimp, on the other hand, turned out to be negative, a spokesman for Customs, Bi Kexin, told the press. China has worried about food safety since the discovery last month of an epidemic outbreak in a gigantic wholesale market in southern Beijing.
Imports blocked for several food producers
Traces of virus were isolated there on a cutting board of imported salmon. Bi Kexin said that Customs had since tested more than 220,000 samples taken from food products and their packaging, but that no other product had been found to be positive. The presence of the virus on shrimp packages does not necessarily mean that the food is contagious, he said.
Beijing has also blocked imports from several foreign producers affected by the new coronavirus, including the American poultry Tyson Foods and the German slaughterhouses Tönnies. Ecuador is one of the countries most affected by Latin America by the pandemic, with more than 62,000 cases of Covid-19, including nearly 5,000 deaths. Authorities also report more than 3,000 deaths likely due to the new coronavirus, but unconfirmed due to lack of testing.