More than 75,000 people – ten times the number of officially confirmed cases – have been infected with the coronavirus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global health emergency, according to a study published Friday.
“We estimate that 75,815 people have been infected in Wuhan as of January 25, 2020,” a group of scientists led by Gabriel Leung of the University of Hong Kong told The Lancet.
As of January 31, the Chinese government said the number of confirmed cases exceeded 9,700 for all of China, including 213 deaths.
Coronavirus distribution map.
For Hubei province – including Wuhan, a city in central China of 11 million people – nearly 6,000 confirmed cases and just over 200 deaths have been officially confirmed.
The World Health Organization on Thursday announced a global health emergency but said it would not recommend any restrictions on international trade or travel.
“The apparent discrepancy between our modeled estimates of 2019-nCoV infections and the actual number of confirmed cases in Wuhan could be attributed to several factors,” Leung said in a statement.
The time lag between infection and the onset of symptoms and the time it takes to confirm cases with laboratory tests “could affect overall reporting,” he said.
The study found that each person infected with the virus that emerged in December could, on average, infect two to three people, and that the number of those infected doubled every 6.4 days.
If the virus is spreading as rapidly nationwide, “it's possible that the epidemic has spread to many major Chinese cities, one to two weeks behind Wuhan,” said co-author Joseph Wu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong.
“Large cities overseas with close transport links to China could also be the epicenter of the outbreak.”
If the new case estimate is accurate, it would mean that the 2019-nCoV virus has a mortality rate significantly lower than preliminary estimates, with less than one percent of the cases being fatal.
But the low death rate can lead to more deaths if the virus spreads uncontrollably.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), seasonal flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 people every year.
In the United States, the death rate among people infected with the flu is 0.13 percent, the Centers for Disease Control estimates.
2019-nCoV is part of the coronavirus family that has been the source of two previous deadly epidemics.
An outbreak of SARS in 2002/03 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) began in Guangdong province and killed 774 people out of a total of 8,096 infected. The 2012 MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak killed 858 out of 2,494 people infected.
The corresponding mortality rates for patients with SARS and MERS were 9.5 and 34.5 percent, which is much higher than for the new coronavirus.
Agence France-Presse.
