Nearly 500,000 residents in Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic originated, may have been infected with the deadly bug, nearly ten times the count recorded, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
A study by the agency used a sample of 34,000 people in the central Chinese metropolis of one million residents and other cities in Hubei Province, as well as in Beijing, Shanghai and several provinces to estimate infection rates. as reported by CNN.
According to the city’s Municipal Health Commission, about 4.4 percent of people tested in Wuhan, which had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases, had specific antibodies that can fight the virus.
The study aimed to estimate the extent of previous infections in a population by testing blood serum samples to detect antibodies from a group of people.
It took place in April, a month after China “contained the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic,” and the results were released Monday, according to CNN.
The study showed that the prevalence rate outside Wuhan is significantly lower. In other cities in Hubei, the province that includes the capital city, only 0.44 percent of the residents studied were found to have antibodies.
Outside Hubei, only antibodies were detected in two of the more than 12,000 respondents.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior global health member of the Foreign Relations Council, said the study underscores the lack of information on infections at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan, in part due to the chaos and lack of inclusion of asymptomatic cases .
Huang said much lower rates in other Chinese cities suggest that “Chinese containment efforts were quick and effective, especially compared to cities like New York.”
The Chinese CDC highlighted the country’s victory in containing the virus by publishing the results on Monday.
“The results of the study show that the population of our country has a low infection rate. It indicates that China has managed to control the epidemic with Wuhan as the main battlefield and has effectively controlled the large-scale spread of the epidemic, ”he said.