key: cord-0856228-kwdvais7
authors: Flahault, Antoine
title: Has China faced only a herald wave of SARS-CoV-2?
date: 2020-03-27
journal: The Lancet
DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30521-3
sha: 20b53d489f1e84d5ad1701b416547badf5d0b864
doc_id: 856228
cord_uid: kwdvais7

nan

the outbreak would involve testing sera of blood samples from the most representative sample of the population at the epicentre of the epidemic, Wuhan. Serology analysis with neutralising antibodies from the 1000 people could allow for the rate of SARS-CoV-2 infections to be estimated with good accuracy. This rate could be extrapolated to the city's entire population and thus inform more precisely whether the provi sional attack rate during this period was a few cases per thousand or perhaps affected 1-2% of the population, 20%, or more. Serosurveys should be seen as polls before elections; they can be repeated several times, 3 week after week, to monitor the epidemic precisely.

There is no reason to wait for the end of the epidemic before doing serosurveys. The results would be tremendously informative to China, first and foremost, and to the entire international community, on the risk of big secondary epidemic waves. 

The attack rate of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) calculated by mathe matical models, from estimates of the basic reproduction number, R0, of 2-3, suggests that 50-60% of the population should eventually be infected because the population seems to be entirely naive to the new virus. 

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