By Alex Jensen
SEOUL
South Korea’s health ministry announced a major success in its efforts to contain the country’s MERS virus outbreak Saturday -- zero new cases and zero additional fatalities.
Since May 20, when the country’s first infection was confirmed in a man who had returned from the Middle East, there has been a near constant trickle of bad news -- feeding public panic considering Saudi Arabia’s MERS fatality rate exceeds 40 percent.
As of Friday, the total number of cases of this flu-like illness in South Korea had reached 166, including 24 deaths.
Recent weeks have also seen stories emerge of infected medical staff and members of the public inadvertently exposing thousands of others, prompting fears of a widening epidemic.
So Saturday’s update allowed officials to believe that they might have been able to stem the tide of infections through widespread quarantine measures.
The main focus has been on healthcare settings -- hospitals have been the primary site of transmission.
A member of the government’s MERS control tower cautiously concluded at a Friday briefing that “the disease is now on the decline.”
The mood appeared to be positive as newly-confirmed Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn began the weekend by receiving a briefing on the latest from his response team.
South Korea is not out of the woods yet -- around 5,200 people are still under isolation orders having been suspected of exposure to MERS. At least 15 patients are reportedly in an unstable condition.
On the plus side, most of the 12,000 citizens who have been subject to quarantine measures have been given the all-clear, while 36 previously infected patients have fully recovered.
