#Coronavirus: The virus has killed 30 of the 50 people who contracted it

[A good piece from the Washington Post]
May 31, 2013
Excerpt:

Yet MERS is worrisome for other reasons. A study published online Thursday in The Lancet described how one patient in a French hospital caught the disease from another who had recently traveled to Dubai and did not survive. The two shared a room together for three days, but it wasn’t until more than a week afterward that symptoms appeared in the other patient. The authors of the study estimated the incubation period at 9-12 days, a long time in which infected people could spread the disease without realizing that they are ill. It still isn’t certain at what stage people carrying the virus are most contagious, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Another concern is that the virus is difficult to identify. An article published in The New England Journal of Medicine this week described how the disease apparently spread through three generations of a family in Riyadh. A boy and his uncle survived the illness, while the boy’s father and grandfather did not. Yet doctors could not confirm the presence of the MERS virus in the youngest of the patients, and were not able to confirm it in the two who died until after they passed away.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/31/this-sars-like-virus-has-killed-30-of-the-50-people-who-contracted-it/