MERS-CoV: 2 new severe disease cases in Riyadh

Last night, Mike Coston's Avian Flu Diary revealed a notice of two new MERS cases in Riyadh. These were reported on the Arabic-language version of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health website.

• 50-year male in an intensive care unit (ICU)with pre-existing underlying disease
• 59-year old ?suffering pre-existing underlying diseases and continues (how long has this case been ill) to receive care in ICU

At the time of this post, 12-hours after Mike's reveal, there is still no mention of this on the WHO site, no obvious sign of Arab News and still no sign on the KSA MOH English language version.

Total cases now at 96 with 46 deaths and the proportion of fatal cases (PFC) at 47.9%.

This resets the clock on "time since last MERS-CoV case announcement", which has nearly reached 3-weeks. Crof has a couple of great rants on this here and here.

The post itself carries the usual level of detail - lots of exposition with limited epidemiology. Its clear once again that the cases being detected most often are those that shout "servee disease". We still lack prospective laboratory (yes, that's underlined, italicised and in bold, and here's an exclamation mark...!) screening data to identify whether the virus is circulating more widely.

Took a while to post this due to a strange error in Blogger overnight: bX-pdmn3h and bX-kp6fkh for those interested. Seems to have been resolved today.