Concerns continued to grow over the spread of Middle East respiratory syndrome in South Korea as it showed no signs of abating and the newly confirmed patients did not match the patient profile outlined in authorities’ earlier predictions.

The South Korean government has reiterated that the possibility of MERS transmission to the general public is low and that the disease is not fatal to healthy people.

Officials have expressed their confidence that they can mitigate the disease, stressing that all cases so far were hospital-associated.

President Park Geun-hye said during a visit to a school that resumed classes on Tuesday that “MERS could be stopped with good sanitation.”

The reassurance, however, appeared to be offset by a number of new trends found among Korean patients.

Korea has now more than six patients that appear to have contracted the virus outside of hospitals. Relatively young patients without preexisting chronic diseases were also among the victims.

Two of the 19 MERS patients who died of the disease were reportedly healthy before contracting it.

Questions were also mounting over experts’ assessment that MERS is not an airborne or aerosol-transmissible disease, with a number of cases suggesting that the disease can be transmitted beyond a 2-meter range.

The MERS’ incubation period has also come into question as a number of patients were found to begin exhibiting symptoms 18-20 days after being exposed to disease, unlike the generally accepted notion that the incubation period lasts for two weeks, during which time the disease is not contagious.

The fatality rate of MERS patents rose to 11.7 percent as of Wednesday afternoon, higher than an earlier estimate by health experts here. According to the health ministry, MERS killed 19 of the 162 people confirmed to have caught the disease.

The death rate, however, remained lower than the global average of 37 percent.

The Korean Society of Infectious Diseases said in its report published on June 4 that the fatality rate of MERS patients in South Korea would not go beyond the 10 percent mark, considerably lower than the fatality rate for pneumonia.

Some experts, however, urged the government to be more cautious in providing optimistic information on MERS and to maintain an objective attitude when addressing the pandemic planning.

“The government doesn’t need to be excessively optimistic when analyzing the MERS pandemic,” Oh Myeong-don, a medical professor at Seoul National University Hospital, was quoted as saying by Yonhap.

“The government must not forget that it should let patients be informed of the risk of the disease and seek the public’s cooperation in combating the disease,” he said.

By Cho Chung-un ()


koreaherald@heraldcorp.com