Deletion Variants of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus from Humans, Jordan, 2015

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We characterized Middle East respiratory syndrome coronaviruses from a hospital outbreak in Jordan in 2015.The viruses from Jordan were highly similar to isolates from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, except for deletions in open reading frames 4a and 3. Transmissibility and pathogenicity of this strain remains to be determined. M iddle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was first recognized in 2012 as the cause of severe lower respiratory tract infection in humans (1).As of November 13, 2015, a total of 1,618 cases of laboratoryconfirmed MERS-CoV infection and 579 associated deaths had been reported to the World Health Organization (2).Human-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV can occur in households and hospitals, but thus far, major genomic changes associated with host switching, as have occurred with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) CoV, have not been noted for MERS-CoV (3-9).We characterized MERS-CoVs from a recent hospital outbreak in Jordan.