New England Journal of Medicine Report: Hospital outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus - bullet points

So many things were divulged from this report, I'll put them down below.  CIDRAP has posted the most information, and their article is located here.  These facts are from that article.  We are speaking of the Al-Hufuf cluster that took place in Al-Ahsa Saudi Arabia earlier this year.  It was a cluster of 23 people and has been listed and reported on thoroughly here at the blog.  A recent post regarding this study, with comments and lists of cases is  located here.

• The report covers 23 confirmed cases that were identified between from Apr 1 to May 23; 11 probable cases also are considered part of the outbreak.
• 21 of 23 cases involved person-to-person transmission in healthcare facilities
• As of Jun 12, 15 of the 23 patients (65%) had died, 6 had recovered, and 2 remained hospitalized
• Most of the patients were men, and the median age was 56
• The team monitored 217 household contacts of patients with confirmed cases. They found only five cases—three confirmed and two probable—in adult relatives of three of the patients
• In mapping transmission chains, the team found that one patient passed the infection to seven other people, one passed it to three others, and four transmitted it to two persons each.
• The median incubation period in the outbreak was 5.2 days (95% confidence interval, 1.9 to 14.7 days).
• they couldn't answer another key question about the virus: whether person-to-person transmission occurred through respiratory droplets or direct or indirect contact and whether aerosol transmission occurred over a distance of more than 1 meter

• The report says the pattern of the outbreak is consistent with the assumption that patients were infectious only when they had symptoms, but this doesn't rule out transmission during the incubation period or during asymptomatic infection.       

 
The article can be found here:  http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306742