After US, India, Europe And Australia, China Now Blames Imported Frozen Food For COVID Outbreak
A year after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic that has so far infected nearly 95 lakh individuals and claimed 1.4 lakh lives in India, a concerted effort from China is under way to shift the blame for the origin of the coronavirus from the wet markets of Wuhan province to other countries, including India.??
The country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the deadly virus. Now, it has blamed the imported frozen food from the United States as the original source of the virus.
Imported frozen food sample
An imported frozen food sample in the city of Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province, tested positive for the novel coronavirus, local authorities said. The sample was taken from a batch of frozen sliced pig ears imported from the US as part of a regular screening before the entry of any imported frozen food into the city's cold storage warehouse, according to the city's epidemic prevention and control office.??
None of the goods have been distributed into the local market. Local authorities have sealed and disinfected the food and quarantined those who had contact with the tainted items, the Xinhua news agency reported.??
This even as China has discovered traces of SARS-CoV-2 virus in frozen meat produced by its companies on Thursday. This is the first time frozen food packages of Chinese companies are reporting novel Coronavirus since in recent months it was only reported in products and containers arriving from abroad, linking them with the latest outbreaks of COVID-19 in other parts of the world.
However, this isn't the first time China's changing narrative on the origin of coronavirus has made the headlines.?Earlier, Chinese authorities had blamed Italy and the United States, largely without evidence, for the outbreak.
Blamed US, India, Australia among others?
In November too, a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences had argued that the novel coronavirus may have possibly?originated in India, among other countries, in the summer of 2019. They further pointed to eight other countries: Bangladesh, the United States, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia or Serbia ¨C from where, they claimed, the virus may have originated.
The Chinese scientists claimed the deadly virus emerged by transferring from animals to humans via contaminated water before travelling unnoticed to Wuhan, where it was first detected.?
In October, China had said that it is not the country where the coronavirus was generated. It said that the coronavirus was spread across several countries and China was the first one to detect it. Following which, a month later, the official?People¡¯s Daily?newspaper claimed in a Facebook post in mid November that ¡°all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China¡¯s Wuhan¡±.
