MANZHOULI, a border city in North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has reported two new locally transmitted asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 from 7 a.m. Tuesday to 7 a.m. yesterday, the regional health commission said.

One suspected COVID-19 case, locally transmitted, was also registered during the same period in the city.

Epidemiological surveys into the cases are under way and 245 close contacts have been put under quarantine.

The sampling for citywide nucleic acid testing has been completed. By 3 p.m. Tuesday, a total of 203,326 people had been sampled for nucleic acid tests, and more than 145,420 of the samples collected had been tested.

On Saturday, two locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported in Manzhouli. The city started conducting nucleic acid tests on all its residents from Sunday afternoon.

As of 7 a.m. yesterday, Inner Mongolia had two existing locally transmitted confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 17 imported ones.

China has seen increasing incidents of imported cold-chain food and packages testing positive for the novel coronavirus with more provincial regions reporting such incidents, the commission said yesterday.

Mi Feng, spokesman for the commission, said apart from imported cold-chain seafood, meat products have also tested positive for the virus and there have also been incidents of positive test results from containers.

There have been instances of both goods-to-people transmission and people-to-people transmission, he added.

The novel coronavirus can survive a long time in low temperatures, and as the pandemic is still raging in many countries, cold-chain food and its packaging could be carriers for cross-border transmission of the novel coronavirus, said Li Ning, deputy director of the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment.

The positive rate for the virus in cold-chain food and its packages is relatively low and the increasing incidents of positive testing recently is due to increasing testing, Li said.

Only 0.0048 percent of cold-chain food has tested positive as of now and the virus is largely detected on food packages, she added.

(Xinhua, China Daily)

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