BEIJING - When Tiger Ye caught the coronavirus in January, his mother and grandmother nursed him back to health. Later that month, both women developed fevers, but with Wuhan's hospitals overflowing they chose instead to bear it out at home.
While China has a long history of questionable economic statistics, under-reporting when it comes to the coronavirus is an issue across the world. New York City recently added more than 3,700 previously unreported deaths to its count, and the World Health Organisation says many countries will likely have to review their numbers.
"In all systems, cases are under-reported," said Antoine Flahault, a public health professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland."Some infections are asymptomatic and cannot be detected by the health care system, some test results come back negative when the person is actually infected, and some can be mis-classified as cases of pneumonia or influenza without any proper testing procedures.
As the outbreak's original epicentre and the only major country at a mature enough stage of its epidemic to start concertedly looking back, China's serological effort will be closely tracked by the global scientific community. China has done this before. In 2003, researchers embarked on a serological survey after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or Sars, outbreak, which sickened 8,000 people and killed almost 800, mostly in Asia.
It could also determine if the virus can linger in people for a long time the way Hepatitis B does in those without sufficient immunity. This tendency to"linger" could be why Korean doctors have found what they termed a"re-activation" of the coronavirus in 51 recovered patients. China has disclosed that it is testing 11,000 in Wuhan but not how many people are involved in other provinces and cities. China's CDC didn't respond to questions from Bloomberg on the survey.
This difficulty in differentiating antibodies is what's stopping South Korea, which has also shown success in curbing its outbreak, from kicking off its serological survey. The country's CDC told Bloomberg it is testing whether certain antibodies are reacting only to the new virus, and not others.