A man wearing a surgical mask as a precaution against the novel coronavirus walks near a hospital in Khobar city on Tuesday.
A man who had contracted the coronavirus has died in Saudi Arabia, raising the death toll in the kingdom from the Sars-like virus to 17, the health ministry announced on its website yesterday. “A male non-Saudi died on Tuesday in a hospital in the Qassim region where he had been admitted several days ago with acute bronchitis,” the ministry said. The ministry announced on Monday that a patient had died of coronavirus in the Eastern Region where most of the kingdom’s cases have been registered. But no new cases have been recorded in that region for five days, the ministry said. The ministry said most of those who had died were “elderly people with chronic illnesses”.