Saudi Arabia has just announced 13 new deaths from the MERS coronavirus, bringing the number of victims of the virus to 139. An emergency meeting was already scheduled for Tuesday at the WHO.
The coronavirus continues to alarm specialists. While we learned a few days ago that an emergency meeting was scheduled for Tuesday at the WHO, the latest report published this Saturday afternoon by the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia worries international specialists even more. Indeed in this report, the authorities therefore report the death of six new people contaminated by MERS. Three young women aged 22, 26 and 35 who died in Riyadh, a 68-year-old woman and a 78-year-old man in Medina and finally a septuagenarian who died in Jeddah, the economic capital. A previous statement released the day before, had also already deplored the death of 7 people: three men of 94, 51 and 42 years old in the Jeddah region, a 74-year-old man in Taif, and a 71-year-old woman and two men aged 81 and 25 in Riyadh.
An emergency meeting Tuesday at the WHO
As the situation becomes more and more worrying in Saudi Arabia, but also in other countries where new cases of Coronavirus Seas have been detected recently, such as in Lebanon, the World Health Organization (WHO) has decided to hold a emergency meeting earlier this week: “Tuesday the emergency committee will have a meeting on the Seas coronavirus,” WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told a press briefing in Geneva. “They have already met 4 times” since the start of the crisis, and had agreed to meet again. The last such meeting took place in December 2013. According to the latest WHO report published on Wednesday (link in English), since September 2012, 489 cases of the Mers coronavirus have been confirmed worldwide, including 126 deaths, even if we now know that there are at least actually 139.
The pilgrimage to Mecca not recommended for fragile people
Faced with the pace of infections that are accelerating, the French site of Ministry of Foreign Affairs thus advises against “the elderly, those suffering from chronic illness, pregnant women and children, to make the small pilgrimage (oumra) and the great pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca this year” in order to avoid spreading the virus. The authorities recall that the coronavirus is a “cousin” more dangerous but less contagious than SARS, with a death rate of 65% against 8% for SARS. A patient who is the victim suffers from a lung infection, fever, cough and severe breathing difficulties. The only difference is that MERS also causes acute kidney failure.
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