On the evening of May 16, Tianjin held the 183rd press conference on the prevention and control of the new crown epidemic. At the press conference, Gu Qing, deputy secretary-general of the Tianjin Municipal Government and director of the Municipal Health Commission, introduced that after the outbreak, Tianjin quickly gathered city-level personnel. Tracing teams are dispatched to epidemic-related areas to carry out emergency response.

As of 18:00 on May 16, 105 close contacts were traced, 154 secondary close contacts, and 62 other risk personnel, all of which have completed centralized isolation.

Other investigation and testing work is still in progress.

　　A total of 488 items and environmental samples were collected from relevant places. Except for 23 positive samples from the residence and working environment of infected persons, all other samples were negative, especially those stored in the cold storage on Admiralty Street, Dongli District. Positives were detected in imported cold chain food packaging and environmental samples.

All epidemic-related places are subject to terminal disinfection.

　　On May 16, the Tianjin CDC analyzed the whole genome sequence of the virus in the relevant case samples, which belonged to the Omicron variant strain (VOC/Omicron, BA.2 evolutionary branch), which was closely related to the recent local cases in Tianjin and other provinces. The sequences of local cases imported from Tianjin are all of different origins.

Epidemiological investigations show that some cases in Dongli District and Beichen District have a history of working in cold storage in Jinzhong Street, Dongli District. It is preliminarily considered that this round of local epidemic is related to contaminated imported cold chain food.

At present, the current round of the epidemic is in the developing stage, but due to the implementation of strategic and active screening in Tianjin, the epidemic was detected in a timely manner, and the epidemic risk was generally controllable.

(produced by Yang Ziyang and Sun Lingling by Liu Yinghan)

Responsible editor: [Zhang Aolin]