AKIPRESS.COM - South Korea has sealed off two hospitals that treated people with a deadly respiratory disease, officials said on Friday, even as the outbreak that has been spreading through health facilities could have peaked, reports Reuters.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome has infected 126 people in South Korea and killed 11 since it was first diagnosed just over three weeks ago in a businessman who had returned from a trip to the Middle East.

The outbreak is the largest outside Saudi Arabia, where the disease was first identified in humans in 2012, and has stirred fears in Asia of a repeat of a 2002-03 scare when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) killed about 800 people worldwide.

The 68-year-old man who brought the virus back from the Middle East visited several health centers for treatment of a nagging cough and fever before he was diagnosed, leaving a trail of infection in his wake.

The danger of the virus in hospitals had led to two being sealed off with at least 133 people - patients and staff - inside. They would be sealed off for at least the next 11 days, given the incubation period of the virus, officials said.

"No patients can get out of their rooms," said a city government official in the capital, Seoul, who declined to be identified.

"Nurses in protective gear are giving them food. No one can get in from outside."

All but one of South Korea's cases have been confirmed as originating with the businessman who traveled to the Middle East and happening in health-care centers, and the last one is likely to be confirmed as such too, the health ministry said.