Via Arab News, a May 14 report: Coronavirus is ‘not spreading’. Excerpt and then a comment:
The Ministry of Health said yesterday that it had stopped the spread of coronavirus from Al-Ahsa in the Eastern Province to other parts of the Kingdom.
The virus had reached Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam, but no further incidences have been reported.
“No new cases of the virus were found in any part of the Kingdom,” Dr. Ziad Al-Memish, undersecretary to the Ministry of Health for Public Health, told Arab News.
So far, the Kingdom has reported 24 cases of the virus, including nine fatal cases. The recent cases included two men aged 48 and 58.
The first patient, a 48-year-old man with multiple coexisting medical conditions, became ill on April 29, and is in stable condition, while the latter fully recovered and was discharged from the hospital May 3 after falling ill on April 6. Al-Memish said the ministry has taken all precautions against the spread of the disease.
However, he added that in keeping with the transparency policy, the ministry would keep the public informed of all developments in this matter.
This report has no mention of the four cases announced late Monday, which should have brought the case total to 28. Nor does it offer any details on those cases in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. And here's one more detail, raised by reader Chris Brougham:
Chris saw the photo in an AFP report, and I'd seen it somewhere recently also. But now I've done a double-take: The guy in this dump of a hospital room is a MERS patient? And the health ministry officials are there to cheer him up with a manly handshake and a little face-to-unmasked-face sympathy?
I suspect it's really just a file photo, thrown in by someone with no understanding of MERS or the way it's supposed to be handled. Maybe AFP just threw it in. But it certainly raises questions about the way the Saudi story is reaching the world.
