Daily US Times: Nearly half a million residents in Wuhan, where the first Covid-19 case emerged may have been infected with the disease — almost 10 times its official number of confirmed infections, a Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study finds.
The study used a sample of 34,000 people in the general population in the Chinese city of Wuhan — the original epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic — and other cities in Hubei province, as well as Shanghai, Beijing and the provinces of Liaoning, Sichuan, Guangdong and Jiangsu to estimate Covid-19 infection rates.
The researchers found an antibody prevalence rate of 4.43% for the disease among residents in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people. Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of Sunday, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.
The study aimed to estimate the scale of past Covid-19 infections in a population by testing blood serum samples from a pool of people for coronavirus antibodies. Its findings are not taken to be final statistics of how many people in a given area have been exposed to the disease.
The study was conducted a month after China “contained the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic,” The Chinese CDC said.
The prevalence rate outside of the city of Wuhan is significantly lower, the study showed. In other cities in the Hubei province, only 0.44% of residents surveyed were found to have coronavirus antibodies.
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