#12,352
With only 15 cases reported this month - and most of those stemming from a household/nosocomial cluster in Wadi Al Dawasir - MERS continues to pop up at a steady, if unspectacular, rate during the first three months of the year.
Today the Saudi MOH announces 1 primary case in Buraidah (Primary - camel contact) and 1 recovery from the Wadi Al Dawsir cluster.
This leaves 9 cases currently under treatment in KSA.
The pattern with MERS over the past four years has been a slow, sporadic, trickle of primary cases - punctuated by large (usually hospital driven) clusters (see graph below).
The most recent hospital cluster notwithstanding, KSA has done a much better job over the past year preventing and/or containing hospital outbreaks.
As long as they are successful doing that - and assuming the virus doesn't evolve into a more transmissible form - we are likely to remain entwined in this uneasy status quo with the MERS virus.
