#14,724
While all eyes have been on China's emerging coronavirus, the MERS Coronavirus - which emerged 8 years ago in the Middle East - continues to exact a toll, albeit at a much slower pace. Over the first 3 weeks of 2020, Saudi Arabia only reported 4 cases.
Epi Week 4, however, has shown an uptick with 5 cases, and includes a cluster with at least 3 secondary cases in Abha City, Asser Region.
January is historically a slow month for MERS cases, but typically we start to see rising numbers in February through June (see The Global Seasonal Occurrence of MERS-CoV).
While it took nearly 3 years for MERS-CoV to rack up as many confirmed cases as we've seen with nCoV2019 over the past month, it remains endemic in camels, and continues to spill over into humans, and therefore remains a threat.
