By Lee Kyung-min
Two additional deaths from Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) were reported on Wednesday, the first in eight days, health authorities said.
They raised the death toll to 35 and the fatality rate to 18.8 percent.
According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, a female patient, 50, died late Tuesday. She had been suffering from tuberculosis before being infected with MERS.
She is believed to have contracted the disease from a patient in Samsung Medical Center’s emergency room during the last week of May.
There has been controversy over the incubation period of MERS, which the authorities say is up to 14 days, because she was diagnosed with the disease 12 days past the incubation period. But the authorities said she was confirmed late because she had been undergoing other tests for tuberculosis.
The other who died was a man, 70, an ambulance driver who was believed to have been infected while transferring another MERS patient. He did not have any underlying medical condition, but was highly vulnerable to the disease because of old age, the ministry said.
Of the 35 patients who died from the virus, 21 were aged 60 or older. Thirty-two of them were either suffering from, or had a history of chronic illness.
With no new infections reported for the past three days, the number of confirmed cases remains at 186.
A total of 119 people have been released from quarantine facilities after full recovery. Thirty-two others are still being treated, and eight of them are in unstable conditions. A total of 811 are in isolation, up 137 from Tuesday’s 674.
Until last week, the government was cautiously weighing when to declare the country MERS-free, as no new cases were reported for four days from June 28 to July 1. But it is too early to make such a call, as four additional cases have been confirmed afterward.
Meanwhile, a group of bereaved families of MERS victims plan to file a class action suit with the Seoul Central District Court on Thursday against the government and local hospitals, claiming their negligence in handling the MERS outbreak resulted in deaths and other financial losses.
Those people claim that infections and deaths resulted from the government's failure to disclose the names of hospitals where suspected cases were reported in the early stages of the outbreak, coupled with some hospitals' negligence in taking precautionary measures for medical staff, according to the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice, an NGO that provides legal counseling services to the victims.