# 7358
A story has been kicking around the Italian media since last evening regarding contacts of the traveler recently returned from Jordan hospitalized with the MERS coronavirus. The reports state that `10 to 12’ contacts have tested positive for the MERS-CoV, but all remain asymptomatic and are not hospitalized.
Crof wrote about it here,this FluTrackers thread has multiple media reports, and ProMed Mail put out an RFI in the middle of the night.
All of the media stories seem to stem from remarks offered by Professor Alessandro Bartoloni, head of infectious diseases at AOU Careggi. Importantly, most of the stories indicate that samples have been forwarded to a national lab for confirmation.
So far, I’ve been unable to get any corroboration from the World Health Organization or via the Italian Ministry of Health site, and the story doesn’t appear to have been picked up by Reuters or AP.
As you might imagine – if true – this story could represent a major change in how this virus (at least in this Italian cluster) is behaving.
But before we go down that rabbit hole, we really need official corroboration, confirmatory re-testing (to rule out PCR contamination and/or false positives), and then we need to give these patients a few days to see if they all remain `mild’ or asymptomatic.
If there is anything to this story, we ought to hear more about it later today.
