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Shanghai connects two of the new cases of viruses to overseas shipping containers

https://foundflight.com/cities/shanghai/ SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) - City officials said on Monday that the first of Shanghai's new coronavirus infections appeared in airport cargo handlers who cleaned a container that arrived on a flight from North America, as it fights a rise in cases among airport staff.
The news comes as Variflight aviation data provider flagged cancellation of more than 40 percent of Monday's flights at Pudong airport, one of the world's busiest and a key gateway for international flights during the pandemic, at the Chinese business hub.
Sun Xiaodong, an official of Shanghai's disease control center, said that an airport cargo handler figured in a case reported on Nov. 9, and a colleague in another case reported on Nov. 10, after both entered and cleaned the container on Oct. 30 together.
Sun told a news conference, 'Research at home and abroad has shown that coronavirus could live in sealed, damp environments.
The container was moist and sealed off inside, Sun said, adding that the strain of the virus found in both cases was very close to that of North America, indicating that the source may be from abroad.
Sun said from epidemiological studies and gene sequencing, experts have concluded that the source of infection can be traced to the container in both cases, both of which were exposed to it but he did not specify if samples had been taken from it.
Shanghai has registered six local cases since Nov. 9, five in the past few days, after five months free of local infections, also involving airport cargo handling staff and their close contacts.
However, investigators say they have not yet found a link between the first two incidents and the most recent ones.
One of the current five incidents concerns a security inspector at the airport's UPS logistics centre, while two are UPS staff. Outside U.S. working hours, UPS was not immediately available for comment.
Since Sunday, 17,719 employees at the cargo handling area of Pudong airport have been checked by airport officials, of whom 11,544 proved negative, but test results for the rest have yet to be released, said Zhou Junlong, vice president of the Shanghai Airport Authority.
"The confirmed cases were only found in the cargo handling area of the airport and the passenger area of the airport was unaffected," Zhou said in the same briefing.
Zhou said the authorities would perform routine nucleic acid checks for high-risk freight staff and give them voluntary emergency use of vaccines.
On Monday, China reported 11 new infections, including two local Shanghai cases, the National Health Commission said. The tally for Mainland China is 86,442 cases, with the death toll unchanged at 4,634.
(Interactive graphic tracking global spread of coronavirus: here)

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