SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The number of people infected with COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first identified, could be about three times the official figure, according to a study by Chinese researchers based on city.
The paper, published Thursday by PLOS magazine Neglected Tropical Diseases, analyzed blood samples from more than 60,000 healthy people taken from places across China from March to May 2020.
It was found that 1.68% of those in Wuhan contained antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, compared with 0.59% in Hubei Province and 0.38% in the rest of China.
With a total population of more than 10 million, researchers estimated that up to 168,000 Wuhan residents were infected with the virus, compared to the official number of 50,340 hospitalized cases.
The study suggested that at least two-thirds of the total number were asymptomatic and that thousands of them could have been infected after the “elimination” of clinical cases, increasing the possibility that the virus could exist in a community for a long period. without causing hospitalizations.
A separate study published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) late last month put the rate of “seroprevalence” in Wuhan, the percentage of population with antibodies, even higher, at 4.43 %, which implies that about half a million people in the city could have been infected.
COVID-19 was identified in Wuhan in late 2019, with the first outbreak associated with a seafood market in the city. China finally closed Wuhan and other cities in Hubei Province on January 23, 2020, but critics say it should have acted sooner.
China has rejected criticism of its early handling of the virus and officials are now pointing to studies abroad that suggest it was circulating in Europe several months before the Wuhan outbreak.
A team of ten people from the World Health Organization was due to arrive in China this week to investigate the origins of COVID-19, but they have not yet been given permission to enter the country.
The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date in mainland China now stands at 87,331, while the number of deaths remained unchanged at 4,634.
Reports by David Stanway; Edited by Michael Perry