The Jordan Times has picked up a Reuters report on Friday's news: Two deaths in April blamed on SARS-like coronavirus. Much of the story is a rehash of earlier accounts, quoting WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl. Buried well down in the story is the local angle:
The Jordan cases were among a total of 12 cases of severe acute respiratory illness that erupted last April linked to a hospital in Zarqa, some 22km east of Amman, Hartl said. Most were health workers, he added.
“The link is the hospital. It could be some environmental thing or human-to-human transmission,” he said.
“The main thing is the fact that even if it were human-to-human transmission, which we don’t know, it doesn’t seem to spread very well or efficiently,” Hartl said.
The two so-called “clusters” of cases, in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, raised the possibility of “limited human-to-human transmission”, or exposure to a common source, the WHO said.
“Ongoing investigation may or may not be able to distinguish between these possibilities,” the UN agency said, noting that some viruses are transmitted within families but are not transmissible enough to cause large community outbreaks.
