Saudi Gazette report

JEDDAH — Two people died after contracting the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus in the Kingdom, the Ministry of Health announced on Monday.

One of the patients was a man in his 50s from Afif in Riyadh. He contracted the virus from another patient. The other patient was 57 years old and was from Al-Asyah in Qassim.

The ministry also reported a 65-year-old patient from Buraidah, Qassim, recovered after contracting the disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday that 10 people have died among 32 infected with MERS in Saudi Arabia since June.

The cases, recorded between June 1 and Sept. 16, bring the global total of laboratory-confirmed MERS cases to 2,254, with 800 deaths, WHO said in a “disease outbreak” statement posted on its website.

MERS first emerged in humans in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and has since spread to cause outbreaks in dozens of countries around the world. The vast majority of the cases — around 1,800 of them — have been in Saudi Arabia.

The virus can cause severe respiratory disease in people and kills one in three of those infected. The WHO said the latest cases did not change its overall assessment that the virus poses a risk of spreading both within and beyond the Middle East.

“WHO expects that additional cases ... will be reported from the Middle East, and that cases will continue to be exported to other countries,” its statement said.

Among the 32 latest cases, 12 were part of “five distinct clusters”, the WHO said. Four of these were within households or families, and the fifth was in a hospital in Buraidah.