It now appears that the new coronavirus found on the Arabian Peninsula is more widespread than initially thought, even though only two people are known to have gotten sick from it.
At first it seemed likely that the two known cases of illness from the new cousin-of-SARS virus may have been exposed in or near the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast.
But now it's pretty certain that a 49-year-old Qatari man who had traveled to Jeddah last month didn't pick up the virus there. Investigators say he probably got infected after he returned home to Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf kingdom 825 miles to the east.
A report in the journal Eurosurveillance traces the man's movements, which hadn't been publicly known before.
"It is likely that the patient's infection was acquired in Qatar, as he was in Qatar for the 16 days prior to the onset of his most recent respiratory illness in September," write researchers from the U.K.'s Health Protection Agency and co-workers.
The man remains on life support in a London hospital after he got infected last month by the previously unknown coronavirus. He can't breathe on his own, so requires treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, basically an artificial lung. He has also suffered kidney failure.
The other known victim of the coronavirus was a 60-year-old Saudi man who died back in June.
The Qatari man, whose identity hasn't been disclosed, suffered a respiratory illness while he was traveling in Saudi Arabia. But, investigators learned, he recovered from that cold 16 days before he fell ill again, that tim..
