5 COVID-19 patients die in Russia hospital fire

A fire at a St Petersburg hospital has killed five coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit.

The blaze was apparently started by a short-circuit in a ventilator, Russian news agencies reported.

The fire was quickly put out and 150 people were evacuated from the hospital, the country's emergency ministry said. It is not clear how many people have been injured.

All the patients who died at St George Hospital had been on ventilators.

"The ventilators are working to their limits. Preliminary indications are that it was overloaded and caught fire, and that was the cause," a source at St Petersburg emergencies department told the Interfax news agency.

Russia's NTV news website reports that the fire did not spread beyond one small Covid-19 ward on the sixth floor.

It quotes doctors as saying a short-circuit caused a ventilator "literally to explode" because of the oxygen concentration, and the ward filled with smoke, which suffocated the patients.

St Petersburg, with a population of approximately 4.9 million people, has 5,483 hospital beds for Covid-19 patients.

A police source quoted by Tass news agency said the ventilator which caught fire was new - it had been installed just this month - and was made by Russia's Ural machine-building plant.

State investigators have opened a case to determine whether there was criminal negligence - either in the ventilator design and manufacture or in the hospital's fire precautions.

The All-Russia Institute for Medical Technology Research points out that there are many different types of medical ventilator, so a fault in one may not be common to others.

Alexei Kurinny, a member of the Russian parliament's health committee, said it was unlikely that a ventilator could have short-circuited or overloaded, and that fire safety was built into their design.

St Petersburg has Russia's third-highest infection rate, with 7,700 infected patients and 56 recorded deaths.

The emergency services sent 105 firefighters and 55 vehicles to the hospital, offficials said.

The news of the fire comes as the country is starting to ease lockdown restrictions. Construction, farming and factory workers are resuming their duties.

Russia now has the third-highest number of confirmed infections worldwide. On Monday, it reported a record daily rise of 11,656 cases, bringing the official total to 221,344.

That means Russia now has more confirmed cases than both Italy and the UK.

Source: BBC

 

Dhaka/AI