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 The 82-year old South Korean, in hospital with asthma and bacterial
pneumonia, had shared a room with others infected with MERS and died
on Wednesday night, the health ministry said in a statement.
The victim became the 36th confirmed MERS infection in South Korea,
which has the most cases outside the Middle East.
More than 1,100 schools were closed in South Korea on Thursday,
while North Korea called for border checks.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has demanded that everything be
done to halt the outbreak, which began two weeks ago, brought into
the country by a South Korean man returning from a business trip to
the Middle East.
MERS first appeared in 2012 in the Middle East, where most of the
442 fatalities have been.
About 1,600 people have been quarantined in South Korea, most of
them at home but some in medical institutions, a health ministry
official said.
Soldiers have been confined to base in areas near hospitals where
outbreaks have occurred, while parents from those areas may not
visit children in the armed forces, a defense ministry official
said.
Among the five other new South Korean cases reported on Thursday
were two health workers who treated infected patients.
"We are in a war," said an official earlier on Thursday at a health
center in Seoul's wealthy Gangnam district, where panic spread when
medical workers in protection suits were spotted near a hotel.
The official said a Middle Eastern guest at the hotel fell ill and
was later quarantined in hospital.
MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as that which
caused SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which
emerged in 2002-2003 and killed around 800 people worldwide.
MERS has a much higher death rate, of 38 percent, according to the
World Health Organisation, but also spreads far less swiftly than
SARS from person to person, making it less of a threat for now.
NERVOUS NEIGHBORS
North Korea had asked the South to provide heat-detecting cameras to
monitor temperatures of South Korean workers traveling to the
inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex, just north of the border, a
South Korean government official said.
South Korea lent North Korea three cameras to use at the complex
during the recent scare over Ebola, the official said.
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The WHO has not recommended travel curbs, but about 7,000 people
from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan had canceled trips to
South Korea as of June 2, a spokesman for the Korea Tourism
Organisation said.
Japan said it was looking into possible quarantine measures for
people arriving from South Korea.
China last week reported its first case, that of a South Korean man
who tested positive after breaking a voluntary house quarantine and
traveling to Hong Kong and on to mainland China.
Authorities have been criticized for being slow to respond to the
initial spread of MERS.
It took several days for the 68-year-old man returning from the
Middle East to be diagnosed, during which time he infected people at
health facilities where he had sought treatment.
All of South Korea's cases have been traced to the man who visited
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the countries with the
most MERS cases.
The man whose death was confirmed on Thursday was the sixth person
in the South Korean outbreak to get the virus through tertiary
infection, meaning he caught it from a patient infected by the
original carrier. All the other cases have been traced directly to
the "index" patient.
As many as 1,164 schools in South Korea had closed or canceled
classes by Thursday, the Ministry of Education said.
While there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, the
virus could change and spread rapidly.
South Korea's new cases bring the total number globally to about
1,180, based on World Health Organization (WHO) data, with at least
442 related deaths.
(Additional reporting by Jack Kim and Joyce Lee, and by Elaine Lies
in TOKYO; Editing by Tony Munroe and Clarence Fernandez)
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