Fire at Russian hospital kills 5 Coronavirus patients

MOSCOW: A fire Tuesday morning at St. George Hospital in St. Petersburg killed five Coronavirus patients who were on ventilators, Russian emergency officials said.

The unnamed emergency officials spoke to the state Tass new agency.

The fire broke out in an intensive care unit and was put out within half an hour. It could have been caused by a faulty ventilator, the Interfax news agency reported, citing anonymous sources.

Police in St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, have launched a criminal investigation into the fire.

It was not the first deadly fire in a Coronavirus hospital in Russia. On Saturday, a fire in the Spasokukotsky Hospital in Moscow killed one patient.

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 on Tuesday morning and killed five people.

Roszdravnadzor, Russia's federal service for supervising healthcare, said it would check the quality and safety of the ventilators in the two hospitals, the RIA news agency reported.

Investigators opened a criminal case into Tuesday'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.

Russia has reported more than 220,000 confirmed Coronavirus cases and 2,009 deaths numbers that international health officials say significantly undercount the true toll of Russia's outbreak. Treating Coronavirus patients has put a strain on the country's vastly outdated health care infrastructure.