That’s not the case, according to new research from France published Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet.
A mathematical analysis of the known cases suggests that “MERS-CoV does not yet have pandemic potential,” even when looking at the worst-case scenario, according to researchers. They looked at the “reproduction value” or R-value, which is a calculation of the number of infections caused by one infected person.
If the R-value is bigger than 1, the number of infections will grow exponentially. For example, if 10 people have MERS and the R-value is two, then those 10 people would infect 20 people, and they would then infect 40 people etc., explains Chris Bauch, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and one of the authors of an editorial accompanying the research.
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