A frozen food fallacy? The coronavirus origin story that doesn't stack up

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

When a cluster of coronavirus cases appeared in Qingdao in October 2020, local health authorities scrambled to test 11 million residents of the Chinese seaport in just five days. The extensive tracing efforts led them back to two dock workers who had been infected with COVID-19 in late September.

It was never confirmed how the workers became infected, but the Chinese Centers for Disease Control revealed it was able to detect genetic traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, on imported frozen cod packages at the docks. It did not state where the imports had been shipped from, but the agency announced in October that this "proved" contact with contaminated packaging could lead to COVID-19.

It was a suggestion at odds with the rest of the world. The US Food and Drug Administration, Australia and New Zealand's Food Standards board and Europe's Food Safety Authority all concluded there is little to no evidence showing SARS-CoV-2 can infect individuals via food packaging. But on Feb. 9, at a press conference detailing findings from a joint WHO and China investigation in Wuhan, the frozen food theory became embroiled in the most controversial and politically loaded question of the pandemic: Where did the coronavirus come from?

Over the past year, two parallel theories have emerged to explain COVID-19's appearance in Wuhan in December 2019. One posits the virus arose naturally and jumped from a bat, possibly through an intermediate species, into a human. The other suggests it may have accidentally leaked from a lab in the city and insidiously spread through the population.

https://www.cnet.com/news/a-frozen-food-fallacy-the-coronavirus-origin-story-that-doesnt-stack-up/

While it's believed COVID-19 is zoonotic that would be a first if it came from a fish.

[soothsayer]

1. It seemed to get reintroduced in Australia from contaminated frozen food containers

I never read much more about that, but I do recall China detecting the virus on frozen food shipping containers too.

Wasn’t in the food —just the containers.

[hlthe2b]

2. Trump defunded the team of virologists/mammologists doing bat research at the time of COVID

origination and disallowed their work to continue. Given the origins of SARS-COV-1, I was and remain horrified. The truth is that researchers working in China for decades can sometimes get around governmental obfuscation, based on long-term working relationships with the Chinese. The same goes for the epidemiologists from CDC that were pulled out early in the Trump administration.

WHO still has good people (including some CDC people detailed to work with WHO), who can get to the bottom of this. I don't discount that COVID-19 can remain viable in sub-zero temperatures, but it is hard to imagine sufficient virus remaining viable for that to be a major route of infection. Still, Noroviruses and Hepatitis A virus can and HAVE been transmitted via frozen food, causing outbreaks, so there is some precedent.

I think it wrong to discount the role bats can have in transmitting the disease to people as well. A large percentage of the most recent fatal human rabies cases (27 since 1990) in the US were bat-strain and many had no knowledge whatsoever of a bat bite as those bites can be barely detectable.

Given Trump's political exploitation of the "intentional or unintentional lab release" theory for his own agenda, I'm not surprised that this has become so difficult. Yet another reason to fully explore the mismanagement of COVID by this administration--once we get through formal investigation of January 6 Insurrection.

BTW, there is zero suggestion that fish can be infected or were the actual naturally infected viral source, but rather human-CONTAMINATED food (including handled fish) or packaging, could have been source of early spread. COVID-19 can not be transmitted to fish (based on actual trials) and while fish do have a number of viral infections, these are in the Herpesvirus, Rhabodvirus, and Iridovirus family. No known Coronaviruses infect fish.