Authorities vowed to
step up disinfection of overseas mail and are insisting postal workers dealing with
it are absolutely vaccinated.
The precautions come
lower than three weeks earlier than the capital opens the Winter Olympic Games and as
a number of cities work to stamp out new outbreaks of coronavirus infections.
“Minimise
purchases of overseas items or receiving mail from overseas,” state
broadcaster CCTV mentioned late on Monday in a social media publish.
“Be certain to
defend your self throughout face-to-face handovers and put on masks and gloves; strive
to open the package deal outdoor.”
Health officers mentioned
the particular person discovered contaminated with the omicron variant opened a package deal from Canada
that had been routed by way of the United States and Hong Kong and transmission
by way of the package deal “could not be ruled out”.
The case highlighted
the significance of “personal defence”, CCTV mentioned.
Similar recommendations
on the right way to deal with parcels, not simply these from overseas, had been made by the
National Health Commission on its official WeChat account and reposted by
authorities in the cities of Shanghai and Nanjing.
China has been an
outlier in asserting that COVID-19 may be transmitted by way of cold-chain imports
reminiscent of frozen meat and fish, although the World Health Organization has
performed down the chance, and has been pushing a story by way of state media that the
virus existed overseas earlier than it was found in late 2019 in the central metropolis
of Wuhan.
In latest weeks,
China has been battling a resurgence in circumstances in a number of cities, a few of them
of the extremely transmissible omicron variant. On Tuesday, it reported 127 new
native circumstances with confirmed signs.
The State Post Bureau
issued a discover on Monday stating that worldwide mail should be disinfected
after reaching China, and staffers who course of and ship worldwide mail
will need to have acquired COVID-19 vaccinations and a booster.
China Post has additionally
been reminding recipients of overseas mail to disinfect the contents “in a
well timed method” with stickers pasted on parcels.
