Workers at a factory in the Chinese city of Tianjin were sent to isolation and thousands of boxes of ice cream at the factory were destroyed – after the remains of the corona virus were found in them.
A huge operation to collect the ice cream boxes has taken place in recent days in the city where 11 million people live, and in the meantime it has become clear that only 65 ice cream boxes out of 5,000 virus-infected packages have been purchased by the residents.
Authorities in China have issued a recall notice on the packaging of the ice cream, urging buyers to report the purchase of the ice cream and even return it to the Tianjin Daqiadeo factory.
It is still unclear how the virus got into the infected ice cream packages, but senior officials believe the virus came from company employees who did not inform employers they were sick in Corona, and came to work at the factory as usual.
“We have inspected and found 29,000 packages that are suspicious to us, and they will undergo a rigorous inspection to locate the remains of the virus,” say senior Chinese government officials. “In the meantime, we have found about 5,000 packages infected with the virus for sure.”
2000 of these packages were fortunately found before they were marketed, and had already been destroyed in the factory. A virologist named Dr Stephen Griffin from the University of Leeds in the UK says that any infection is a bad thing to worry about, but “what happened at the Chinese plant is probably the result of poor hygiene or some sort of problem on the production line, as the virus is likely to pass through frozen food. negligible”.