Food market provides ideal environment for coronavirus spread: experts

Beijing reported more than 100 cases of COVID-19 in the past five days, and most had close contact with a local wholesale food market, similar to the situation in Wuhan, Hubei Province, where a cluster of patients was linked to a seafood market.

The similarity sparked renewed public concern over the cleanliness of such markets in China.

As of Tuesday morning, 276 agricultural markets, and 33,173 catering service units including canteens and restaurants in Beijing, had been disinfected and 11 underground and semiunderground markets had been closed, local authorities said.

A further 27 new cases were confirmed on Monday in Beijing, bringing the five-day total to 106. Most of the patients had been to Xinfadi Market, the largest such facility in the capital city.

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention,

said that such markets are prone to coronavirus infections because of their chilly environment, which provides a suitable environment for the virus to thrive.

Zeng said that seafood was probably not an intermediate host that transmitted the virus to humans.

Beijing health authorities said the virus they detected in samples collected in Xinfadi Market was more similar to strains spreading in Europe rather than those in China.

Positive samples were detected from those collected on chopping boards.

Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, said that the coronavirus could survive for weeks in wet, chilly markets. “It’s an ideal environment for viruses to live and be transmitted,” said Yang.

Such conditions can be found around the world, experts said. This was previously shown in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2001, where the H5N1 virus was detected in domestic birds in a live bird market, media reported.

Illegal trading in wet markets of wildlife that have not undergone health checks increases the risk of infectious disease outbreaks.

China has been toughening bans on wildlife trade and provisions to protect these animals after the COVID-19 outbreak.