Failure to pass coronavirus nucleic acid packaging test could lead to exporters being frozen out of Asian giant.
Last week, in a non-peer reviewed paper, researchers at the South China Agricultural University and Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Guangzhou, claimed that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, collected from salmon samples could survive for eight days at 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit).
First reported in Bloomberg, the temperature is around that which salmon are transported.
The South China Morning Post reports that the Chinese government enabled new regulations with potential penalties on Friday after the study was published.
The publication explained that the CCP’s customs authority said that “under the new rules, cold food exporters that failed a Covid-19 nucleic acid packaging test twice would be blocked from shipping to China for a week, while those that failed it three times would be frozen out for a month.”
In June, coronavirus detected on a chopping board for imported salmon in Beijing, China, sparked a health scare across the country.
