Lack of Action: Wuhan Was Severely Behind in Coronavirus Testing from January to March

Epoch Times analyzed the official data that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published on the coronavirus infection and virus testing in Wuhan from January to March. It showed that the Wuhan government was severely behind in testing to confirm infections. This is likely to indicate that many infections probably went unconfirmed (as suspected cases) or unidentified (as there was nothing recorded at all).

Epoch Times reported the following:

On January 27, Wuhan announced that 892 cases were newly confirmed on that day and a total of 1,590 cumulative cases were confirmed. On January 29, the Wuhan Health Commission website stated, “From January 23 to January 27, (we) have tested a total of 4,086 samples among which 712 were positive.” This leads to two questions:

Since China had very a rigid rule on confirming the coronavirus infection and the nucleic acid testing is a mandatory step, how did Wuhan confirm the 1,590 infection cases while only 712 samples tested positive?
How could Wuhan confirm 892 cases alone on January 27, which is even more than the 712 positive tests (from January 23 to January 27)?

On January 29, the Wuhan Health Commission website said, “Due to the high pathogenicity of the virus, researchers need to go through a gradual process to familiarize themselves with the testing process, so they will not test 2,000 samples per day from the beginning, but rather (they will start low and) gradually increase the number.” This means that though the government had the ability to test 2,000 samples, they did not do that many then.

On January 28, the Wuhan Health Commission website said, “Visits of fever patients have been increasing daily. The peak is over 15,000 people.” Even if Wuhan tested 2,000 samples, they were still be severely below the 15,000 fever patients.

On January 28, the Wuhan Health Commission website said, “From January 22 to January 27, a total of 75,221 people came to be checked for fever.” Wuhan tested only 4,086 samples during that period.

On March 3, the Wuhan Health Commission website said, “Nucleic acid tests were given to 18,127 people on the day of March 1. In the past three days, Wuhan conducted an average of 20,466 tests per day. (Regular) hospitals and modular hospitals mainly used the test for existing patients, not to confirm new cases.” This means it is likely that the government did more than 10,000 tests on confirmed patients and less than 10,000 tests were used to test new cases per day.

{Editor’s note: Epoch Times didn’t mention this point in its writing, but one may ask, if Wuhan did over 10,000 tests on confirmed patients each day and if it tested each patient twice in the duration of the treatment, that would mean the government would have tested 50,000 confirmed patients in 10 days, and 150,000 confirmed patients in 30 days.}

On March 26, the Wuhan Health Commission website said, “The whole city conducted nucleic acid tests on 9,844 people on March 24.” It is still less than 10,000 tests per day.

Therefore, the city has done less than 10,000 tests for new infection cases per day. Even if the city did 10,000 tests every day from January 23 to March 23, it would have only tested 600,000 people. For a city of 15 million people, that’s 4 percent of the population.

Thus, the testing is significantly insufficient.

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