South Korea yesterday confirmed that a man who died a day earlier had been infected with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), the third fatality in a virus outbreak that has fueled growing alarm in the country.
The 82-year-old South Korean, hospitalized with asthma and bacterial pneumonia, had shared a room with others infected with MERS and died on Wednesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare said in a statement.
He became the 36th confirmed MERS infection in South Korea, which has the most cases outside the Middle East.
Photo: AP
More than 1,100 schools were closed in South Korea yesterday, while North Korea called for border checks.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has demanded that everything be done to halt the outbreak, which began two weeks ago when a South Korean man returning from a business trip to the Middle East brought the virus into the country.
MERS first appeared in 2012 in the Middle East, where most of the 442 fatalities have been.
About 1,600 people have been quarantined in South Korea, most at home, but some in medical institutions, a health ministry official said.
South Korean soldiers have been confined to base in areas near hospitals where outbreaks have occurred, while parents from those areas are prohibited from visiting their children serving in the armed forces, a South Korean Ministry of National Defense official said.
Among the five other new South Korean cases reported yesterday were two health workers who treated infected people.
“We are in a war,” an official said yesterday at a health center in Seoul’s Gangnam District, where panic spread when medical workers in protection suits were spotted near a hotel.
The official said a Middle Eastern guest at the hotel fell ill and was later quarantined.
MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as that which caused SARS, which emerged in 2002 and killed about 800 worldwide. MERS has a much higher death rate, of about 38 percent, according to the WHO.
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