The hospital at the epicenter of South Korea's deadly MERS outbreak started to return to normal on Monday, as officials moved closer to declaring a formal end to a crisis that triggered widespread panic and choked the local economy.

The past two weeks have seen no new reported cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome, which has killed 36 people since the first case - diagnosed on May 20 - developed into the largest outbreak of the virus outside Saudi Arabia.

Of the 186 reported cases, nearly half were diagnosed at the Samsung Medical Center in southern Seoul - one of the top hospitals in the country.