Cold-chain food contamination as the possible origin of COVID-19 resurgence in Beijing

作者：Xinghuo Pang, Lili Ren, Shuangsheng Wu, Wentai Ma, Jian Yang, Lin Di, Jie Li, Yan Xiao, Lu Kang, Shichang Du, Jing Du, Jing Wang, Gang Li, Shuguang Zhai, Lijuan Chen, Wenxiong Zhou, Shengjie Lai, Lei Gao, Yang Pan, Quanyi Wang, Mingkun Li, Jianbin Wang, Yanyi Huang, Jianwei Wang, COVID-19 Field Response Group · 发表于：National Science Review · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.1093/nsr/nwaa264 · 被引用次数：217 · 研究领域：SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 [1,2], has been contained in China through stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions. Border control and quarantine have effectively prevented the virus from being spread by infected travellers, but the risk of resurgence caused by other routes of introduction and transmission remains unclear, and current strategies to prevent resurgence could be flawed. Since July, SARS-CoV-2 RNA contaminations in frozen food imported from countries with ongoing epidemics have been reported in nine provinces in China [3,4]. However, there is no robust evidence of COVID-19 outbreaks initiated by environment-to-human transmission. Here we add to evidence of such transmission by investigating the recent COVID-19 resurgence in Beijing. On 11 June 2020, a 52-year old man suffering from fever and cough was diagnosed with COVID-19 in Beijing, after a 56-day zero new case interval. He had no exposure history of known COVID-19 cases. On 12 June, 112 close contacts of the index case and 242 environmental samples collected from the places that he had visited were tested by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). All close contacts were negative, but two environmental samples from Xinfadi Market (XFDM) were positive for SARS-CoV-2. This led to in-depth investigation to confirm the role of XFDM in virus spread. A total of 538 employees from the booths that were close to the SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were tested, and 45 were p...