Ice cream find sparks virus race

The coronavirus was found on ice cream produced in eastern China, prompting a recall of cartons from the same batch, says the government.

Daqiaodao Food's plant in Tianjin was sealed off and its staff were being tested, a city government statement said. There was no indication anyone had contracted the virus from the ice cream.

Most of the 29,000 cartons in the batch had yet to be sold.

Authorities said 390 sold in Tianjin were being tracked down, with officials notified of sales to their areas.

The ingredients included New Zealand milk powder and whey powder from Ukraine. The Chinese government has suggested the disease, first detected in Wuhan in late 2019, came from abroad and has highlighted what it says are discoveries of the coronavirus on imported fish and other food, though foreign scientists are skeptical.

It reported 109 new confirmed cases yesterday, two thirds of them in a northern province that abuts Beijing, and no deaths.

There were 72 new cases in Hebei province, where the government is building isolation hospitals with a total of 9,500 rooms to combat an upsurge in infections, said the National Health Commission.

China had largely contained the virus but has reported hundreds of new infections since December. The commission on Saturday blamed them on travelers and imported goods that it said brought the virus from abroad.

China's death toll stands at 4,653 out of 88,227 total cases.