Food-trade-associated COVID-19 outbreak from a contaminated wholesale food supermarket in Beijing

Shan Lu; Weijia Wang; Yanpeng Cheng; Caixin Yang; Yifan Jiao; Mingchao Xu; Yibo Bai; Jing Yang; Hongbin Song; Ligui Wang; Jiaojiao Wang; Bing Rong; Jianguo Xu

doi:10.1016/j.jobb.2021.04.002

Food-trade-associated COVID-19 outbreak from a contaminated wholesale food supermarket in Beijing

J Biosaf Biosecur. 2021 Jun;3(1):58-65. doi: 10.1016/j.jobb.2021.04.002. Epub 2021 Jun 26.

Authors

Shan Lu^{1

2

3}, Weijia Wang⁴, Yanpeng Cheng⁵, Caixin Yang⁵, Yifan Jiao⁵, Mingchao Xu⁶, Yibo Bai⁵, Jing Yang^{1

2

3}, Hongbin Song⁷, Ligui Wang⁷, Jiaojiao Wang⁸, Bing Rong⁹, Jianguo Xu^{1

2

3

10}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, PR China.
² Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, Shanghai Institute for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases, Shanghai, PR China.
³ Research Units of Discovery of Unknown Bacteria and Function, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, PR China.
⁴ University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.
⁵ Scholl of Public Health, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, PR China.
⁶ Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, PR China.
⁷ Center for Disease Control and Prevention of Chinese People's Liberation Army, Fengtai District, Beijing, PR China.
⁸ The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China.
⁹ Department of Epidemiology, Center for Global Health, School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, PR China.
¹⁰ Institute of Public Health, Nankai University, Tianjing, PR China.

Abstract

The re-emerging outbreak of COVID-19 in Beijing, China, in the summer of 2020 originated from a SARS-CoV-2-infested wholesale food supermarket. We postulated that the Xinfadi market outbreak has links with food-trade activities. Our Susceptible to the disease, Infectious, and Recovered coupled Agent Based Modelling (SIR-ABM) analysis for studying the diffusion of SARS-CoV-2 particles suggested that the trade-distancing strategy effectively reduces the reproduction number (R0). The retail shop closure strategy reduced the number of visitors to the market by nearly half. In addition, the buy-local policy option reduced the infection by more than 70% in total. Therefore, retail closures and buy-local policies could serve as significantly effective strategies that have the potential to reduce the size of the outbreak and prevent probable outbreaks in the future.

Keywords: Agent Based Modelling; COVID-19 outbreak; Control measures; Food distribution network; Transmission mechanism.