BEIJING • China has detected its first local asymptomatic infections in more than a month as two port workers responsible for unloading frozen seafood tested positive, adding to alarm that contaminated imports could be transmitting the coronavirus.
The two cases, found in Shandong province's Qingdao city during routine testing of port workers on Thursday, were the first symptom-free infections that China has reported since Aug 20.
China has not reported any local symptomatic infections since Aug 15 either. Unlike other nations, China separates asymptomatic and symptomatic cases in its daily tally, and the former are moved into the latter category if and when they start showing signs of illness.
The new cases will intensify concern in China over whether imported products are infectious.
While the US Food and Drug Administration has said there is no evidence the coronavirus is transmitted on food or food packaging, Chinese researchers have found that the virus on chilled salmon may be infectious for more than a week.
The growing number of cases linked to cold storage and port workers is an ongoing mystery.
There were resurgences in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Dalian earlier this year connected to people working with imported food products, but experts have been unable to say conclusively where the infections came from.
In New Zealand, a run of 102 days without a local virus case came to an end when a worker at a cold-storage plant in Auckland fell sick last month. But officials said preliminary findings from environmental testing at the plant debunked the theory that the route of transmission was through chilled surfaces on materials arriving from overseas.
In Qingdao, the local health commission said 132 close contacts of the two patients have been quarantined, and 129 among them have tested negative so far.
China reported eight new Covid-19 cases on Thursday, compared with seven cases disclosed a day earlier, the national health authority said yesterday.
The National Health Commission said in a statement that all new cases were imported infections involving travellers from overseas.
The number of new asymptomatic cases fell to 18 from 20 a day earlier.
The total number of confirmed Covid-19 infections in mainland China now stands at 85,322, while the number of total deaths remains unchanged at 4,634.
BLOOMBERG, REUTERS
