ABOVE: Wuhan, China, January 24, 2020
© ISTOCK.COM, JULIEN VIRY
Five months since COVID-19 exploded in Wuhan, researchers still don’t know exactly how many people caught the disease in the city during those crucial early days of the outbreak. At the heart of this problem is the fact that testing in the city of 11 million people was very limited in those early days of the outbreak. By January 23, the first day of the city’s lockdown, just 495 cases had been officially confirmed.
As one researcher based in Hong Kong puts it, Chinese authorities were clearly aware that they had a much bigger problem on their hands than that number suggested.
“They decided to build the hospitals, they sent doctors to Wuhan,” says Daihai He, a mathematical epidemiologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, referring to two hospitals with capacity for more than 2,500 people that were constructed in early February ...
