“An expatriate living in Qatar has died of [Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)], bringing to four the number of deaths in the Gulf state from the coronavirus, health authorities said on Friday,” Agence France-Presse reports. “Experts are struggling to understand the disease, for which there is no vaccine,” the news agency writes (11/22). In a report released on Friday, the WHO “said … the continuing outbreak of [MERS-CoV] cases is probably being sustained, as some researchers have suggested, by a combination of human-to-human transmission and spillover from animals or other non-human sources — not one or the other,” CIDRAP News reports. “The agency’s current MERS-CoV count is 157 confirmed and 19 probable cases, for a total of 176. With 69 deaths, the case-fatality ratio is 39.2 percent,” the news service writes (Roos, 11/22).

The KFF Daily Global Health Policy Report summarized news and information on global health policy from hundreds of sources, from May 2009 through December 2020. All summaries are archived and available via search.

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