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COVID Numbers in Wuhan Were 10 Times What Was Reported: Study

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Coronavirus
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An eye-opening new serosurvey by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that almost half a million people in Wuhan, China were infected with COVID when the virus first hit.

That’s almost 10 times the official number of confirmed cases that were reported.

The serosurvey was conducted in April, although the CDC data was released only on Monday, 29 December which showed that the epicentre of the novel coronavirus pandemic withstood much more devastation than officially reported. It did not say if the results had been published in any journal as yet.

On Sunday, 28 December, Wuhan reported 50,354 Covid positive cases as per the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.

What Did The Study Find?

The study used a random sample of 34,000 people in Wuhan (a metropolis of 11 million people), other cities in Hubei province, Beijing, Shanghai, and the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Sichuan and Liaoning to estimate Covid-19 infection rates, reported CNN.

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The study aimed to estimate the scale of infections in the past by testing blood serum samples from a pool of people for covid antibodies. Therefore these findings are estimates and not final statistics of how many people were exposed to covid.

Out of those tested in Wuhan, the researchers found an antibody prevalence rate of 4.43 per cent for Covid-19 - which means that percentage was found to have the antibodies required to fight the pathogen that causes Covid.

What does this mean? The ratio would suggest that Wuhan with a population of 11 million people had as many as 500,000 residents infected. This is 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in Wuhan, as reported by the Chinese health authorities in mid-April.

This study was conducted one month after China had its first wave of the pandemic.

How Could This Underreporting Happen?

How could this happen? One of the reasons could be that the virus often has asymptomatic cases, where people do not feel sick or show any symptoms but are carriers of covid.

Another reason is that as the novel virus hit, health systems were in chaos and this lead to a failure to accurately count cases. Another could be that in the beginning, Wuhan like most countries, did not have the requisite testing kits or PPEs to treat patients in the hospitals and many were told to return home and self-isolate to contain the surge.

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It must be noted that many countries faced an underreporting crisis due to a lack or crunch in resources. For example, a study sponsored by the New York State Department of Health showed that by end March nearly one in seven New York adults had Covid which was also about 10 times higher than the official account.

Another study in August found that 27 per cent of the total 1.5 million residents in New York had covid antibodies.

Still, this raises questions on the accuracy of data revealed by Chinese authorities to the world on cases, deaths and more as they reported better figures than what they knew internally. CNN reported on leaked documents from a whistleblower in the CDC which showed that they knew of "clinically diagnosed cases" internally but did not reveal them to the public. They also publicly reported a lower count of confirmed cases and deaths on February 10 and March 7 than they recorded internally, the documents showed.

What Wuhan Did Right

Interestingly, the prevalence rate outside of Wuhan was much lower - for example in Hubei, only 0.44 per cent of the population surveyed had covid antibodies. This could mean that Chinese efforts at containment in Wuhan were speedy and efficient - unlike in other parts of the world, most notably the US and Europe, where the virus spread like wildfire.

Wuhan had the first unprecedented (at the time) lockdown in the pandemic, where they effectively sealed off from the outside and shut all modes of transport like buses, trains, flights immediately.

Critics are divided on the ‘draconian lockdown’, as millions of residents were confined to their homes for two months as public transport and non-essential shops were shut down. This came at a huge personal cost to residents who could not even use taxis to go to the hospital, but these tough measures helped the country fight the pandemic.

Many countries since have tried to emulate the lockdown - including India - to varying levels of effectiveness.

(With inputs from CNN.)

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Topics:  Wuhan   Wuhan coronavirus 

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