Sars-related virus blamed in five deaths

Nine test positive in 3 Mideast countries

The spread of the novel coronavirus in the Middle East has now expanded to include Jordan, with five deaths now confirmed, the World Health Organization announced Friday.

There are now nine confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, which is genetically related to the virus that causes SARS. The five deaths include three Saudi Arabians — two from the same family — and two people in Jordan, who were part of a cluster of illnesses in April, a WHO official told Reuters.

“The two clusters (Saudi Arabia, Jordan) raise the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission or, alternatively, exposure to a common source,” WHO said Friday in an updated backgrounder of the new virus.

“Ongoing investigation may or may not be able to distinguish between these possibilities.”

The new virus has now appeared in three countries: Jordan, Qatar (where two citizens are now recovering) and Saudi Arabia, with cases in Jeddah and Riyadh — cities about 850 kilometres apart.

In the Saudi Arabian cluster, three members of the same family are confirmed to have been infected, two of whom died. A fourth relative also became sick with respiratory symptoms but has tested negative for the virus, according to WHO. The Jordan victims from April are among a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses linked to a hospital in Zarqa, 40 kms outside the capital, Amman, a WHO spokesperson told Reuters. Most were health-care workers. According to an April report posted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, a mysterious respiratory illness was reported on April 19 in an intensive care unit. Among those infected were one doctor and seven nurses, one of whom died. At the time, WHO was asked to help test samples from the cluster of pneumonia cases in Jordan but they all came up negative for any known human coronaviruses. The novel coronavirus was not discovered until months later, after a 60-year-old patient in Saudi Arabia died in June. Further testing on his samples unearthed the novel coronavirus (HCoV-EMC). The identification of the Saudi patient — and a subsequent second confirmed case from Qatar — prompted a global alert in late September. This led Jordan’s Ministry of Health to send stored samples to the WHO so they could be tested for the novel coronavirus. They were confirmed this month. The clinical picture of the new coronavirus is described as an acute respiratory infection and all of the confirmed cases have shown signs of pneumonia, the WHO said.