By Lee Kyung-min
A patient suspected of having Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) has tested negative, health authorities said Wednesday.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said that the 22-year-old woman, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) national who arrived here last Friday, showed MERS-like symptoms but was confirmed not to be infected with the respiratory disease.
“After reviewing her blood and saliva samples, we confirmed that she is not infected with the disease. She is now resting at the National Medical Center (NMC) in central Seoul,” a KCDC official said. “This was the first test, and we’ll conduct a second one in 48 hours later according to the anti-MERS manual.”
The result came some 15 hours after the woman, whose identity is being withheld, visited Kangbuk Samsung Hospital (KSH) in central Seoul at 2 a.m. after suffering from a fever, sore throat and coughing.
Upon examination, medical staffers there told her that she needed to be quarantined as her symptoms matched those of MERS. They tried to quarantine her in a negative pressure room temporarily set up near the emergency room in the hospital, but she refused.
The woman and her two companions insisted that she be quarantined in her car parked outside the hospital. But they drove back to her hotel nearby at around 4 a.m.
Hospital staffers asked the police and UAE embassy for help to locate her. She was located and transferred to the NMC at around 7:20 a.m.
A joint team of epidemiological investigators and community health center officials conducted an on-site inspection at the hotel where she stayed, KCDC said.
Including her, Korea has had 77 suspected MERS cases this year, and all were found negative.
The respiratory disease, which was brought into Korea by a man who visited the Middle East, swept the nation last summer. Of the 186 confirmed patients, 38 died.