hankyoreh

discharged patients

As of June 25, a total of 29 people in South Korea have died of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), beginning with the 25th patient, a 57-year-old woman, on June 1. As of Thursday, 180 people had been diagnosed with the disease.

A simple calculation would suggest that the mortality rate is 16.1%, but experts think that the actual mortality rate will be higher by the end of the MERS outbreak.

On Thursday, the MERS task force at the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced that the 45th patient (aged 65) and the 173rd patient (70, female) had died on June 24, bringing the total number of fatalities to 29.

While the majority of people who have died of MERS had preexisting conditions, four or five patients - including the two who died on Thursday - reportedly had not complained of having any other major ailments.

On average, death has occurred 12 days after symptoms of MERS appear and seven days after patients are diagnosed. The 64th patient (75) and the 36th patient (82) were only diagnosed after their deaths.

The patient who fought the disease the longest before succumbing was the 45th, who died on June 24, 23 days after contracting the disease and 18 days after being diagnosed. This patient was infected by the 16th patient while taking care of his wife at Konyang University Hospital in Daejeon between May 28 and May 30.

“If 10 people have been diagnosed and you use that as the denominator in calculating the mortality rate, you’re going to get an error. The only way to know whether a patient will live or die is to wait until they are released from the hospital. One way to compensate for the illusion of a low fatality rate is to use the total number of cases from two weeks ago as the denominator,” said Oh Myeong-don, a professor of infectious diseases and internal medicine at the Seoul National University College of Medicine.

Under this method of calculation, the fatality rate rises to 23% (29 deceased as of June 25 ÷ 126 diagnosed as of June 11).

In Saudi Arabia as of June 24, there were 1,038 cases of the disease and 460 deaths, yielding a fatality rate of 44.3%. Calculated by the number of cases two weeks ago (1,029), the fatality rate increases to 44.7%, but the difference is only slight because of the large number of cases.

By Lee Keun-young, senior staff writer

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