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. (Text, Photo by BBC)
