BEIJING: Multiple cases of coronavirus have been detected among workers of a major meat processing unit in China’s Harbin city.

The media report has spread concern among people as they were already worried about safety of foods from the viral infection.

10 workers at the CP company, where about 50 million chickens are slaughtered annually, were infected initially. Later, officials of the meat processing plant apprised the media that 28 other people had also contracted the virus. The factory is owned by one of the world’s largest poultry producers, a Thai conglomerate.

The news of the coronavirus clusters at the slaughterhouse was trending on China’s social media application, Weibo. According to reports, products of the company were removed from shelves of at least three supermarkets of Harbin city.

In 2020, China had blamed imported frozen meat and fish for the increasing number of COVID-19 infections, as thousands of workers at meat processing companies in the US, Brazil and different European countries had contracted the disease.