COVID cases in Wuhan may have been 10 times higher than reported: Study

As many as half a million residents of Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated, may have been infected with the virus, about 10 times more than the initially recorded number of confirmed cases.

According to a study released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that surveyed more than 34,000 people in April, roughly 4.4 percent of those tested were found to be carrying the antibodies that fight off the virus that causes COVID-19.

The presence of antibodies means the people had the virus at some point in the past and, given the ratio, nearly 500,000 residents of Wuhan, which has a total population of 11 million, could have been infected, as per a NDTV report.

This is nearly 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed cases reported by Chinese health authorities in mid-April.

As of Sunday, Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.

This week’s study indicated that the infection rate in Wuhan was significantly higher than in other Chinese cities.

China has been criticized internationally for its initial handling of the outbreak, which has spread around the world in a global pandemic in the year since the first cases emerged. The U.S. has raised questions about China's accounting of the virus fallout in Wuhan, which was quickly eclipsed by larger outbreaks in Europe and North America. A number of revisions of the case and deaths data added to suspicions China was massaging the numbers.

On Monday, a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in China was sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” according to multiple reports.