#15,555
Twelve days ago, in Saudi MOH: 5 Months Without A MERS-COV Update, we looked at the prolonged silence of KSA authorities on MERS-CoV cases in the Kingdom since last May.
MERS reporting out of Saudi Arabia has always been a bit erratic, including a nearly 3-month gap during the summer of 2018 (see The Saudi MOH Breaks Their Silence On MERS-CoV).
In that case they did eventually back fill the data on their website, and they continued to report privately to the WHO during their `outage'.
The World Health Organization's last report was in early July (see WHO DON: Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) – Saudi Arabia), but it only reported details on the cases reported through May.
Worse, WHO EMRO - which had managed to post monthly reports of MERS in the Middle East even during past `information blackouts' by the Saudi MOH, hasn't posted an update since January 2020.
Given that Saudi Arabia reported 56 MERS cases in the first 23 weeks of 2020, and has only reported 1 case in the past 23 weeks, it seems likely we are missing a good deal of surveillance data.
As the above Saudi MOH MERS Surveillance chart indicates, this week the Saudi MOH has posted their first MERS case since Epi Week 23. Details are scant, but the patient is listed as a 51 y.o. male with camel exposure in the capital city of Riyadh.
Whether KSA will `back fill' data from the past 5 months - as it did after their three month reporting pause in 2018 - remains to be seen. Nor do we know if this latest announcement signals a return to real-time reporting of cases.
Prior to the emergence of COVID-19, MERS-CoV was considered the coronavirus with the greatest potential to spark a pandemic. While SARS-CoV-2 beat it to the punch, the pandemic potential of MERS-CoV has not gone away.
Hopefully today's report signals a renewed commitment to open reporting of cases in Saudi Arabia. For a brief overview of why MERS-CoV remains a significant threat, you may wish to revisit last May's MERS-CoV: Forgotten, But Not Gone.
