Did half a million people in Wuhan contract the coronavirus?
- Large-scale study finds Covid-19 antibodies in more than 4 per cent of blood samples taken from residents of the Chinese city
- Results suggest infections were more widespread than official total of confirmed cases, experts say
The results from the first large-scale survey of its kind in the country indicated that 4.43 per cent of the city’s residents had antibodies for the virus, a standard measure of past infection.
While various factors, including uneven distribution of infections within a population, make it difficult to pinpoint how many people were infected, the findings suggest that roughly half a million people in the city may have contracted the virus during the initial outbreak.
That total is 10 times the 50,008 people officially recorded by mid-April in Wuhan, where a flood of infections overwhelmed the city’s health system in the weeks after the virus was first identified late last year.
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Returning to Wuhan one year since the Chinese city became ground zero of the Covid-19 pandemic
The survey was conducted by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) a month after China’s first wave of Covid-19 was suppressed.