It is not possible to get the coronavirus from any type of food. The head of the Food Safety Inspection Body, Georgi Avetisyan, spoke about this during a press conference at the Armenian Unified Infocenter.
He said that the virus cannot spread through meat or other food because viruses cannot withstand heat exposure; they quickly are destroyed when exposed to heat.
Regarding selling bread without any plastic wrapped around it, Avetisyan said that there are no legal measures that state that bread must be wrapped in plastic. However, many business owners have started to package bread and ship packaged bread to stores based on the Food Safety Inspection Body’s recommendations. “Many stores have already begun to create shelves with glass or plastic. We have started to receive photos on a daily basis of this. But we don’t know if the virus will stay on the packaging for a long time or not, so we can’t say anything about that.”
Store employees are required to wear gloves when giving people bread or other food, and then take off their gloves to receive payment, but they do not always follow that rule. “Unfortunately, there are business owners who have not understood the seriousness of the situation and they will be punished. I hope that we will hear about cases where business owners were punished because they did not provide their employees with masks and gloves.”
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As far as how often large grocery stores are checked, Avetisyan said that supermarkets are checked once per year, but there are sometimes cases where people call with complaints, so they go to check the complaints.
As a result of the fight against the coronavirus outbreak, Armenia declared a state of emergency on March 16th and began to limit people’s free movement on March 24th.
Nelly Babayan
