The Saudi health ministry on Sunday announced a new MERS death, raising to 55 the number of people killed by the coronavirus in the country with the most fatalities. A 37-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh, the ministry said on its website. The World Health Organisation says it has been informed of 155 laboratory-confirmed MERS cases world-wide so far, including 64 deaths, most of them in Saudi Arabia.
Experts are struggling to understand the disease, for which there is no vaccine. It is considered a deadlier but less-transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died.