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

The re-emerging outbreak of COVID-19 in Beijing,China,in the summer of 2020 originated from a SARSCoV-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.