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Not fifty thousand, but presumably half a million, or ten times more than previously reported, were infected in Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic began.
– noted the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention (CDC), which cited a report Wednesday on CNN news television.
At the time of the study, 34,000 people were studied in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province, as well as in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, Jiangsu, Sichuan and Liaoning provinces. The aim of the study was to estimate the true extent of transfection based on a blood test for antibodies. The investigation was carried out a month after Chinese authorities announced that they had stopped the first wave of the epidemic.
When analyzing the samples, it was found that the body formed during the coronavirus infection had a frequency of 4.43 percent in the body of those studied in Wuhan, the capital of Hupei province. Wuhan health authorities reported 50,354 infections identified at the time, but serological tests suggest that ten times as many, nearly half a million, were infected.
In other cities in Hubei province, the prevalence rate was significantly lower, at just 0.44 percent. Of the 12,000 people tested outside of central China, only two had antibodies in their bodies.
China’s foreign affairs official Jen Chung-huang partly explains the chaos of the outbreak that
Local authorities reported far fewer infections than they actually had and, in part, by not including asymptomatic cases in the official report.
Fever patients were flooded in Wuhan hospitals in January and February, but the hospitals did not have enough staff, tests or other medical equipment to diagnose or treat them. As a result, many patients were sent home, some of them infected their own relatives and others died in their own homes without being recorded by the authorities in the official death statistics.
According to Jen, the fact that antibody rates were much lower in other Chinese cities shows that Chinese epidemiological measures were quick and effective, compared to measures taken “especially in cities like New York.”
CNN notes that the situation was similar in many countries, with antibody tests revealing that
the number of infected was much higher than reported.
A study commissioned by the New York Office of Health, for example, found that by the end of March, one in seven New York adults had contracted the virus, ten times more than those in official statistics. And an antibody test in August showed that 27 percent of the 1.5 million locals surveyed had antibodies in their bodies.
In Wuhan, unprecedented steps were taken to slow the rapid spread of the virus; On January 23, the big city was completely cut off from the outside world, all air, train and bus services were canceled and the main roads leading to the city were closed. In Wuhan itself, authorities carried out a draconian shutdown, public transportation was suspended for more than two months, stores were closed, and millions of locals were unable to leave their homes or even go to the grocery store.
However, the people of Wuhan paid a heavy price for the 76-day lockdown, especially those who needed hospital treatment but could not reach health facilities.
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