Russia looks at ventilators after 5 patients die in fire

RUSSIAN authorities said they would look into the safety of artificial lung ventilators being used at two hospitals after a fire broke out in St Petersburg at one of them yesterday morning and killed five people.

The blaze erupted after a ventilator in an intensive care ward treating 20 patients with the COVID-19 burst into flames, one source told the TASS news agency.

It was the second fire to break out at a hospital treating coronavirus patients in less than a week. A similar fire erupted at a Moscow hospital on Saturday killing one person.

A TASS law enforcement source said that a ventilator had caused that fire too. The source said the ventilators that caused both fires had been produced in the same factory in the Urals.

Roszdravnadzor, Russia’s federal service for supervising health care, said it would check the quality and safety of the ventilators in the two hospitals.

Investigators opened a criminal case into yesterday’s fire.

Russia is relatively well stocked with ventilators and has increased domestic production since the coronavirus outbreak. But data, experts, and some medics say many machines outside big cities are old.

In this case however, the ventilator reported to have started the St Petersburg fire was new, having only been installed this month.

A third fire broke out on Monday at a private hospice in the Moscow region which killed nine elderly people. The hospice’s owner was detained by police.

A further two people later died in hospital, the RIA news agency reported.

Russia has reported 232,243 cases of the novel coronavirus, the second highest number in the world as of yesterday morning, 2,116 deaths.

(Reuters)