New Coronavirus Is Less Transmissible Than SARS in Study
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The new coronavirus that has killed 42 people since September, most of them in Saudi Arabia, is less transmissible than the related SARS virus and probably won’t touch off a pandemic, a study found.
Researchers from France’s Pasteur Institute analyzed clusters of infections involving 55 of the first 64 cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS-CoV, and calculated that each case resulted in an average of 0.69 subsequent infections, compared with 0.8 for the SARS virus. The findings were published in The Lancet today.