Nearly 500,000 residents in Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic originated, may have been infected with the deadly virus – almost 10 times the recorded count, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
A study by the agency used a sample of 34,000 people in China’s central metropolis of about 1 million residents and other cities in Hubei province, as well as Beijing, Shanghai and several other provinces to estimate infection rates, CNN reported.
About 4.4 percent of those tested in Wuhan – who reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases, according to the city’s Municipal Health Commission – found that they had specific antibodies that can fight the virus.
The study sought to estimate the scope of previous infections in a population by testing blood serum samples for antibodies in a group of people.
It was carried out in April – a month after China “contained the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic” – and the results were released on Monday, according to CNN.
The prevalence rate outside Wuhan is significantly lower, the study showed. In other cities in Hubei, the province that includes the capital, only 0.44% of the residents studied had antibodies.
Outside Hubei, antibodies were detected in only two people out of more than 12,000 people surveyed.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior global health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the study highlights the underreporting of infections at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan – partly due to chaos and the failure to include asymptomatic cases.
Huang said that much lower rates in other Chinese cities suggest that “Chinese containment efforts have indeed been quick and effective, especially compared to cities like New York.”
The Chinese CDC highlighted the country’s victory in containing the virus when it released the results on Monday.
“The results of the study show that the population of our country has a low rate of infection. This indicates that China was able to control the epidemic with Wuhan as the main battleground, and effectively controlled the large-scale spread of the epidemic, ”he said.