The number of people infected with the new coronavirus in Wuhan, the cradle of the pandemic, would be ten times greater than the toll announced so far by Beijing, according to a study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Covid-19 appeared late last year in the city of 11 million people in central China, quarantined for 76 days by the authorities as of January 23, 2020.
According to serological tests carried out in April after the peak of the epidemic, 4.43% of the inhabitants of Wuhan were carriers of antibodies, that is to say that their body had reacted to the presence of the virus.
Reported to the population of the city, this means that some 480,000 people have been infected, almost 10 times more than the toll of 50,000 contaminations communicated so far by the authorities.
The difference may have been related to “an underestimation of cases during the chaos of late January and early February, when a lot of people weren’t tested or the tests were unreliable,” the AFP Huang Yanzhong, public health specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank.
Wuhan is by far the most affected city in China by the virus, which has claimed 4,634 lives nationwide according to the official report, including nearly 4,000 in the city on the banks of the Yangtze.
The last death was reported in China in mid-May, when the virus had already spread around the world.
According to the same study published on Monday, the contamination rate peaked in April at 0.44% in the rest of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital.
The province was also under a quarantine until the end of March.
In six other provinces and cities of the country, tests carried out on 12,000 people revealed only two cases of contamination. A total of 34,000 people were tested as part of the study.
These figures confirm that the epidemic has been largely confined to the city of Wuhan, as Chinese power practically crippled the economy of the entire country for several weeks.
By comparison, the virus’s prevalence rate reached 23% in New York City last September.
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