Up to half a million residents of the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated may have been infected with the virus, about 10 times more than the initially recorded number of confirmed cases.
According a study launched on Monday by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention which interviewed more than 34,000 people in April, about 4.4% of those tested carried antibodies that fight the virus that causes COVID-19.
The presence of antibodies means that people have had the virus at some point in the past and, given the proportion, almost 500,000 residents of Wuhan, which has a total population of 11 million, may have been infected.
This is almost 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed cases reported by Chinese health officials in mid-April.
As of Sunday, Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.
This week’s study indicated that the infection rate in Wuhan was significantly higher than in other Chinese cities. For example, the survey found that only 0.44% of Hubei residents interviewed were carriers of the antibodies.
According CNN, Yanzhong Huang, a senior global health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the initial underreporting in Wuhan could be partly attributed to the chaos of the early months of the pandemic, as well as the failure to count asymptomatic cases of COVID-19.
Huang pointed out that underreporting is not an exclusive problem for Wuhan, as testing capacities were limited and hospitals were overwhelmed with a sudden increase in patients because little was known about the virus in the first few months.
However, the Chinese government also faced scrutiny and criticism because of a suspected lack of transparency about the severity of the virus.
On Monday, a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in China was sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of “creating fights and causing problems”, according to several reports.
The charge is used regularly by the Chinese government against human rights activists and other dissidents.
Zhang Zhan, 37, traveled to Wuhan in February and filmed hospitals, neighborhoods and more as the city closed during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. His report accused the government of failing to inform citizens about the reality of the pandemic.
Prosecutors accused Zhang of “publishing large amounts of false information” and receiving interviews from international media outlets to “maliciously shake Wuhan Covid-19’s epidemic situation”, CNN reported.