China has a packaging problem.
Beset with a handful of coronavirus cases ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the nation has locked down millions of people in entire cities and ordered widespread testing.
The likely culprit, at least in Beijing? A letter mailed from Canada that had passed through the U.S. and Hong Kong, Chinese authorities claim.
Chinese state media said Tuesday that a letter from Toronto was probably contaminated with virus particles that rubbed off on an unsuspecting person, triggering a host of restrictive measures to halt any spread.
It started when a person with no travel history or other exposure came down with COVID pneumonia, the Beijing Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement. The patient reported a sore throat on Jan. 13, fatigue and fever the day after, and then an early infection was detected.
While the person had not had any discernible means of exposure, they did mention that they had received “international mail,” the Chinese authorities said. Upon analysis of the mail, which was sent from Canada on Jan. 7, traveled through the U.S. and Hong Kong, and arrived on Jan. 11, the Chinese detected omicron. Several other pieces of mail from the same source also tested positive, Chinese authorities said.
“The similarity with some strains isolated in North America and Singapore in December 2021 is high,” the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control said in a statement Monday. “To sum up, combined with the epidemiological history of the case, the test results of suspicious items, and the gene sequencing results of the case specimens, the possibility of contracting the virus through foreign items cannot be ruled out.”
Because of this, China has instructed its citizens to “minimize the purchase of overseas goods during the period of high epidemic situation abroad” and instructed postal workers to wear protective equipment, receive booster shots and undergo regular testing, AP reported. They must isolate, clean and hold international packages to make sure they’re virus-free.
The entire country is on high alert for new outbreaks as the Olympics approach. Throughout the country about 20 million people are under lockdown, and mass testing is under way in cities that have discovered any cases at all, The Associated Press reported.
The World Health Organization says that the bulk of transmission occurs via droplets hanging on the air, since it needs “a live animal or human host to multiply and survive and cannot multiply on the surface of food packages,” according to AP. Moreover, at least one study showed that it takes just 20 minutes for the virus to lose 90% of its infectivity even then.
Canada clapped back.
“SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, does not survive in an infectious form for very long outside an infected host or person,” Dr. Gerald Evans, an infectious disease specialist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., told Canada’s Global News, calling it “implausible” that the virus could have survived that long, let alone remained infectious.
