China’s latest potential foreign culprit of coronavirus? Auto parts packaging

Hong Kong CNN — More than a year since the coronavirus pandemic began, while a surprising – and frustrating – number of points remain unclear, one thing is certain: the first major outbreak was in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Chinese experts disagree however, with Wu himself saying in November that “more and more evidence is showing that frozen seafood or meat products can bring viruses from outbreak countries into China.” Video Ad Feedback See how China disinfects frozen foods for suspected coronavirus 03:03 - Source: CNN While initially this theory appears to have emerged from an abundance of caution after China had essentially controlled its domestic outbreak and was concerned new infections from overseas could undermine this, it has evolved to present a potential cause of the pandemic itself – one that would, conveniently, serve to diminish Chinese government responsibility. “All available evidence suggests that did not start in central China’s Wuhan, but may come into China through imported frozen food products and their packaging,” the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed in November, citing Chinese experts, including Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” Zeng said, telling another newspaper “tracing the virus cannot answer all questions, but it is very likely that the virus had co-existed in multiple places before being spotted in Wuhan.” As well as speculating about frozen food packaging, Chinese officials and state media have also hyped studies that seem to suggest the virus was circulating outside the country last September or even earlier, even as scientists have criticized the methodology of certain papers and warned against drawing conclusions from them. “Strong claims supported by flimsy evidence get widely reported without the necessary scrutiny and consideration of a wider body of available evidence,” Francois Balloux, a geneticist at University College London, wrote in a Twitter thread about several reports of earlier circulation, noting that the evidence for the virus being in Europe as early as August was “highly unconvincing.” Video Ad Feedback Chinese journalist who covered Wuhan Covid-19 outbreak jailed 02:41 - Source: CNN Last month, Global Times, a nationalist Chinese state-run tabloid that has been at the forefront of pushing this and other theories, ran an “investigation” into “a new hypothesis: did the early outbreak in Wuhan originate from imported frozen food?” “Although it might be too early to jump to conclusions, the possibility that the coronavirus was passed on from cold-chain products into Wuhan, or more specifically, to the Huanan wet market, where the sale of frozen products was once prevalent, cannot be ruled out,” the paper claimed, adding that “more evidence is needed, and scientists worldwide are urged to join hands to further research this hypothesis and pinpoint the origin of the virus.” Such research is underway, with a WHO team arriving in Wuhan last month to investigate the origins of the pandemic, after months of negotiation with Beijing, which has been wary of allowing any outside probe until now.