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BEIJING – Six new cases of Covid-19, all of them local transmissions, have appeared in Wuhan just two weeks after the city in central China declared that the last of its patients had been discharged from the hospital.
On Tuesday (May 12), local health authorities ordered the entire city of 11 million to undergo nucleic acid testing over a 10-day period in an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, and Most importantly, prevent a second wave of infections just a month after a block is lifted.
Wuhan was the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak in China.
As details of the tests are resolved across the city, the new cases highlight the challenges of restarting the nation’s economy, which is facing its worst contraction since 1992, while still dealing with a disease that still prevails in minus three provinces, as Asymptomatic patients continue to appear.
All six cases in Wuhan, including two married elderly couples, are from the same neighborhood.
It is unclear how the virus entered the community, but it was first detected in an 89-year-old man who had symptoms in late March and was self-medicating.
When he visited the hospital for other ailments earlier this month, doctors examined him and found him positive for Covid-19. Tracing contacts led to other residents of the neighborhood to be evaluated, resulting in dozens of asymptomatic cases that were quarantined.
But, according to China’s tabulation system, patients who show no symptoms but have tested positive for the nucleic acid test are not added to the official count.
Therefore, the count can be misleading because around a dozen asymptomatic cases have been reported daily in Wuhan since those figures were released starting April 1. As of Tuesday, there were still 589 patients under “medical observation.”
“Community-level cross infection in the city has not yet been eliminated, highlighting the challenge of preventing those who have the virus without showing any symptoms from infecting others,” the China Daily official said in an editorial on Tuesday.
But a leading scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Wu Zunyou, said testing the entire population was “unnecessary” and that mass testing should only be done in critical groups that have increased exposure to virus.
Another expert, Dr. Gregory C. Gray, professor of medicine at Duke University’s Global Health and Environmental Health unit in the United States, described asymptomatic patients as the “primary problem” for physicians struggling with Covid-19.
“While massive testing (molecular or serological) would help identify cryptic foci of infection, they would have to be repeated periodically and therefore expensive and very difficult to maintain,” he told The Straits Times.
“I don’t see an easy, low-cost solution to stop transmission below a mass vaccination schedule that may also need to be repeated every several years to maintain immunity,” he added.
There’s also the problem of Wuhan’s ability with official statistics showing that 1.03 million people had undergone nucleic acid testing in late April.
But the 53 laboratories and 211 testing clinics in the city can process just 46,000 samples per day, well below the nearly one million per day needed to meet the goal of evaluating the entire city population.
Ultimately, the crux of the problem in China, and the rest of the world as cities reopen, remains the best way to deal with asymptomatic carriers as they try to restart the economy.
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