As one of the world’s last major holdouts of a zero-tolerance approach to the virus, China is fanning unusual theories about the source of emerging COVID-19 clusters despite doubts from overseas experts over the likelihood of such claims.
On January 18, 2021 Hong Kong ordered 2,000 hamsters, chinchillas, rabbits, and other small animals to be “humanely” put down after a health check on the rodents found 11 to carry the Delta variant of COVID-19. All of them are hamsters imported from the Netherlands, from a local pet shop where a 23-year-old worker had tested positive to COVID-19.
While the officials acknowledged there’s no clear evidence hamsters could transmit the virus to humans, they are telling pet owners who bought hamsters from any store in the city beginning December 22, 2021 to hand over their animals for culling. Those who visited the pet store after January 07, 2022 are subject to quarantine. All 34 pet stores in the city that sell hamsters are now shuttered, and imports of all small mammals have come to a halt.
Hong Kong’s pet killing follows heightened virus containment measures in Beijing, where authorities suggested that mail from Canada might have been the culprit for the city’s first Omicron case.
The city’s health officials noted how the first Omicron patient, a 26-year-old woman, who has not traveled outside Beijing recently, handled a parcel sent from Canada via the United States and Hong Kong, before developing a sore throat two days later. They have detected the Omicron variant on both the outside of the package and in its contents, as well as on other mail samples delivered from the same origin, the officials said.
“This is something not only new but intriguing and certainly not in accordance with what we have done both internationally and domestically given what we know about the transmissibility of Omicron,” he told reporters at a January 17, 2022 press conference.
Health experts have assessed the risks of virus transmitting through contaminated surfaces to be extremely low. The World Health Organization (WHO) said that coronavirus in general “need a live animal or human host to multiply and survive and cannot multiply on the surface of food packages.”
Touting the theory that the virus might have come from somewhere other than China is hardly new for the Chinese authorities. In October 2020, Beijing said an outbreak in the port city of Qingdao originated from a shipment of imported cod. In a June outbreak linked to a Beijing wholesale market, officials pointed to frozen salmon from Norway as the cause, citing a sample on a cutting board used for processing the fish that tested positive for COVID-19.
July last year, amid tensions between India and China, Beijing withheld over 1,000 containers of Indian shrimp on the grounds that the packaging allegedly contained virus residues.
In a bid to deflect growing scrutiny on Beijing’s coverup of the pandemic origins, authorities and state media have consistently put forward claims, without credible evidence, that the virus originated outside of the country. Following a WHO-China joint virus probe in China’s Wuhan last year, authorities have also repeatedly called for origin tracing efforts to begin outside of China.
The regime’s pandemic-control actions, though, have also come at a particularly sensitive time for Beijing. Less than three weeks before the country’s capital opens the Winter Olympic Games, Beijing and cities across China have struggled to stamp out waves of COVID-19 infections.
Hundreds of Omicron infections have surfaced in multiple parts of China even as Delta cases continue to spike. After the Omicron variant extended its reach to Beijing, Olympic organizers called off ticket sales to the general public, saying the entry will be reserved for a targeted group of spectators only.
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