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Destruction after the explosion in a provisionally built corona hospital in Russia
Photo: Nail Fattakhov / ITAR-TASS / imago images
A tank of medical oxygen has exploded at a hospital for corona patients in Russia.
Videos showed a massive detonation on Saturday in the city of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers east of Moscow.
The authorities also announced that surrounding houses were damaged by the force.
People were therefore not injured.
The 160 patients were taken to another clinic or to a building in the city stadium.
Initial reports that two people died in the explosion were denied by the governor of the region.
The two patients died before the explosion.
It is unclear why the explosion occurred.
The authorities told the state agency Tass that the equipment for supplying patients with oxygen had only been installed in the past few days.
In Russia, the number of new corona infections has been rising rapidly for weeks.
More than 18,000 new cases were reported on Saturday.
According to official statistics, more than 1.6 million people have been infected since the pandemic began.
Temporary hospitals are now being set up in many cities and regions.
Low quality medical technology
It is not the first time that there have been serious problems with medical equipment to combat corona in Russia.
In May, two Aventa-M ventilators caught fire in Russian hospitals.
Five Covid 19 patients died in the fire in an intensive care unit in St. Petersburg, four days earlier a patient in Moscow had died under the same conditions.
In both cases, a short circuit is suspected that set the oxygen mixture in the devices on fire.
The fact that domestic medical technology products are inferior to foreign competition has not only been an issue in Russia since Corona.
As early as 2018, twelve medical aid organizations warned in a joint letter to President Vladimir Putin that the policy of import substitution should be extended to ventilators: The domestic devices "do not meet current requirements, are of lower quality, do not work as reliably and have fewer functions than Western models" , it said in the letter.
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mhe / dpa / Reuters
