Will eating cherries with positive nucleic acid test be infected

Imported cherries are tested positive for nucleic acid. Will they infect COVID-19 after eating them?

On January 21, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Liangxi District, Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, carried out normalization monitoring on imported food, and found that the nucleic acid on the inner surface of an imported cherry with the production date of December 18, 2020 was positive.

A few days ago, the news of the price reduction of imported cherries only made many people taste fresh, and this time, the surface of cherries was found to be positive for nucleic acid test, which also made the majority of netizens shout “a little scared”. The news was once on Weibo hot search, and as of press time, the reading volume had exceeded 300 million.

Luan Rongsheng: No problem. Whether it is cherries or other fruits, they will be cleaned or peeled before eating. Although the surface of fruits may be polluted during processing, handling and transportation, most viruses on the surface of fruits can be removed after cleaning.

Luan Rongsheng: There is no digestive tract transmission route in SARS-CoV-2, so even if a small amount of viruses enter the human body through the digestive tract, they will not be infected. Moreover, animal experiments also show that feeding contaminated food to animals does not cause infection and spread of animals, so the public need not pay too much attention or panic about this matter.

Imported goods have to go through two customs. The first is the import quarantine, which is the responsibility of the customs. Inspection and quarantine includes quarantine of people, animals, plants and articles, and the pollution rate of imported cold chain food is one in hundreds of thousands, which is extremely low. Secondly, food safety is the responsibility of the food and drug supervision department. As long as these two barriers are held, the risk is extremely low when the goods reach consumers.