By Larry Romanoff – November 18, 2020
In late 2012, the world experienced the onset of a new mini-epidemic from a novel coronavirus that was named MERS (1) (2) because it supposedly originated in the Middle East, at first infecting small numbers ofpeople in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar. Then England experienced a few cases where individuals apparently became infected during trips to the Middle East.This new virus was similar to SARS but was accused of having mutated and developed an ability to invade human cells more efficiently and therefore kill about 50% of those infected, compared to only about 10% for SARS. The virus was first seen by an Egyptian virologist in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia while doing tests on a patient with unusual symptoms, with the discovery soon after that this 'patient zero' and the Qatari man in the UK had been infected by viruses that were 99.5% identical. (3) There was no vaccine or treatment for the disease, and its fatality rate reached over 40% overall.
By early 2013 there had been nearly 100 cases, mostly centered in the Middle East with the others consisting of infected travelers to those regions (4). But two years later, by June of 2015, almost 2,500 cases of MERS had been reported, most of these being in the Middle East with almost the entire remainder being in Korea, apparently centered on the Gyeonggi provincial district. A small number of cases had been reported in about 25 other countries and, while the virus did not appear to spread easily between humans, it produced a fatality rate in some locations of almost 50% of those infected. South Korea eventually experienced almost 200 cases with about 40 deaths. (5) (6)
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