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Cat Wang

China’s CDC has issued sanitation guidelines for package and food delivery companies after the coronavirus was detected on several parcels earlier this month.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday that the companies should disinfect delivery equipment and ensure workers had hygienic supplies throughout their shifts.
The guidelines were issued even though those who came in direct contact with the packages, from the shippers to the recipients, tested negative for the virus.
The CDC said on Wednesday that the virus was found on one parcel from Inner Mongolia that was delivered to Beijing and another sent to Liaoning province.
Two other packages sent and delivered within Inner Mongolia also showed traces of the virus.
Hong Kong health authorities also said on Wednesday that routine testing indicated traces of the virus on a package that arrived in the city on November 13, six days after it had been sent from Inner Mongolia.
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Zhang Liubo, the CDC’s chief expert for disinfection, said no cases of infection were linked to the packages, but deliveries to and from high-risk areas should stop.
“High-risk areas should stop receiving and delivering packages, and couriers should improve how they monitor their health,” Zhang said after a State Council meeting about virus control measures.
“It’s essential to protect the packages during the delivery process. After parcels arrive at the centralised sorting area, the surface of the package should be disinfected, usually with cleaning spray and ultraviolet radiation.”
Courier company ZTO Express said it would fully disinfect its mail delivery trucks and packages.
SF Express said it would step up epidemic prevention measures to ensure the safety of the full delivery chain.

But scientists said it was difficult for the coronavirus to spread via parcels.
Emanuel Goldman, a professor of microbiology at Rutgers University, said transmission was “extremely unlikely” if someone only made contact with a contaminated surface.
“The virus is fragile and dies quickly outside of a human host under normal real-life conditions,” said Goldman, who wrote a commentary on the transmission of the virus for the medical journal The Lancet last autumn. “This is a disease that you get by breathing, not by touching.”
He added that a false positive would have come about from the remnants of RNA, or the building blocks of the virus, even though the virus was no longer capable of infecting people.
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Professor Leo Poon Lit-man, head of the University of Hong Kong’s public health laboratory sciences division in the faculty of medicine, said the virus was unlikely to be transmitted through the mail but it might be worth paying attention to see if the workers handling the parcels were carriers themselves.
“The real concern is, why are there so many packages testing positive? Maybe infected [people] are in the courier company, or in the post office, and they continue to work in these settings, so they contaminate the parcel,” he said.
If they want to reduce the risk, they could wear gloves and a mask and maintain hand hygiene when handling the deliveries, he said.
“We have to be alert … but it’s not a huge threat,” he said.
China has also been warning about potential transmissions via cold chains such as frozen food supply lines, though scientists said there was no evidence that such contaminated packages had caused any infections.
The country has battled a series of small outbreaks and sporadic cases in dozens of provinces and cities in recent months.


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Guidelines released after traces of the pathogen detected on a number of parcels
Transmission of the disease via mail unlikely, health experts say


Guidelines released after traces of the pathogen detected on a number of parcels.


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Coronavirus: China tells delivery firms to step up disinfection of packages

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Guidelines released after traces of the pathogen detected on a number of parcels Transmission of the disease via mail unlikely, health experts say

Guidelines released after traces of the pathogen detected on a number of parcels

Transmission of the disease via mail unlikely, health experts say