Qatar: A little more on the two latest MERS cases, one is an expatriate.

Qatar: A little more on the two latest MERS cases, one is an expatriate.HT: Croft.

Via Kuwait News Agency: Qatar records new coronavirus case. The entire report and then a comment:

Qatar confirmed Sunday a new case of coronavirus disease, a 23-year-old expatriate. The male patient was diagnosed after routine checkup on the virus. He is being treated and his condition is stable, Qatari Supreme Council of Health (SCH) said in a statement. 

The statement added the patient was diagnosed in the country's flu national center, noting that all relatives of the patient were examined and preliminary results were negative. 

Meanwhile, SCH also noted that a previous coronavirus patient, a Qatari citizen, has completely recovered and left the hospital.

So the recovered patient is likely not the contact involved in the new patient's case, who we now know is a male, and an expatriate. From what country? The report doesn't say, and neither does this report from Qatar's The Peninsula. 

That contact may be identifiable through the lists of FluTrackers and Andrew Rambaut, both of which include the new asymptomatic case. A possible contact might be Rambaut's case #129, a 56-year-old woman who died in Doha on September 3. But that's a long time ago, and her contacts would presumably have been checked within a few days of her being hospitalized in late August.

The only other recent Doha case is Rambaut's case #161, a Qatari farmer who is presumably the one who has now recovered. Was he the employer of the new asymptomatic case?

I guess it's fun, in a boy-detective way, to figure out the connections between these cases when we have so little information about them. But this is a potentially very serious disease with global health implications, and we should be beyond boys' games in the way we deal with it.

Related: Saudi Arabia: Another MERS death

Thanks to Helen Branswell for tweeting the link to this report on the KSA MOH Arabic corona page: Health announces the death of infected case Pfyrus Coruna in the Eastern Province. The Google translation:

In the framework of Investigation epidemiological and continuous follow-up carried out by the Ministry of Health for HIV Corona virus that causes AIDS Middle East respiratory MERS-CoV Ministry announces the death if infected with the virus amount in advance in the Eastern Province at the age of 83 years old, and she has had several chronic diseases. Ngmayora God rest in peace.

This case was announced by the MOH just yesterday, but you'll have to read it in Arabic or use Google Translate; the English-language MOH corona page hasn't been updated since September 27—just one month ago today.