Maybe the numbers will change overnight, but they've been the same for over a week. In Flublogia, the twittersphere, and the media in general, the lack of hard news is starting to be felt.
Too many news reports are hand-wringers about the potential disaster of pilgrims picking up the disease during the Hajj and spreading it around the world. Such worries would be more credible if more of the current Saudi cases were people just passing through. Instead, most seem to be elderly stay-at-homes, too ill from other diseases to do much travelling.
The MOH map is instructive: The infection sites are are everywhere, from Aseer in the southwest to Hafar Al-Batin in the northeast. Where the cases cluster, as in Al-Ahsa, they seem to be nosocomial infections. You're more likely to catch MERS in a hospital than in an airliner bound for Jakarta or Lahore. But perhaps nonhuman sources of MERS are now widespread across the country, as well as other Gulf states. Or perhaps not.
Maybe we've been spoiled by the rapid identification of SARS and other emergent diseases, but the inability to find an origin for MERS is highly frustrating. Presumably commando teams of crack epidemiologists are sweeping the peninsula, sampling everything in sight and shipping swabs from the anuses of countless bewildered bats to many overworked labs.
Even if they're not finding anything, it would be consoling to know what, exactly, is being done to find MERS outside a few Saudi hospitals.
