Nearly 500,000 residents in Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic originated, could have been infected with the deadly bug – nearly 10 times the number, 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 – were found to have specific antibodies that can fight the virus.
The study aimed to estimate the purpose of previous infections in a population by testing blood serum samples for antibodies from a group of people.
It was conducted 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 percent of residents studied were found to have antibodies.
Outside of Hubei, antibodies were found in only two of the more than 12,000 respondents.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior member of global health at the Foreign Relations Council, said the study highlights the underreporting of infections at the height of the Wuhan outbreak – partly due to chaos and failure to include asymptomatic cases.
Huang said that much lower rates in other Chinese cities suggest that “Chinese isolation efforts have been really fast 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 infection rate. This indicates that China has managed to control the epidemic with Wuhan as the main battlefield and effectively controlled the widespread spread of the epidemic, “he said.