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Corona test center in Russia (symbol image)
Photo: EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA / REUTERS
There was a tragic technical malfunction at a corona station in Russia.
Nine patients died after an oxygen supply failure.
The reason for the accident was a tear in an oxygen supply hose in the clinic in Vladikavkaz, Russian news agencies quoted the Prime Minister of the Republic of North Ossetia, Sergei Minjailo, on Monday.
According to the Ministry of Health, all of the fatalities were artificially ventilated.
According to the Tass news agency, a criminal investigation has been launched.
According to official information, 71 people were in intensive care on the ward at the time of the accident.
13 of them received "life-sustaining" measures.
Minjailo said that the lungs of the nine patients who died were already "90 percent damaged" before the accident.
It is therefore premature to attribute her death to the tear in the oxygen supply hose alone.
The breakdown was "discovered quickly and fixed within 30 to 40 minutes".
In principle, there is no problem with supplying hospitals with oxygen in North Ossetia.
Meanwhile, Tass reported, citing the investigative authorities, that a criminal investigation had been initiated to determine whether security standards had been violated.
Again and again incidents in hospitals
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been several fatal fires on Covid wards in Russian hospitals.
Defective ventilators are considered to be the cause of the fire.
Three people were killed in a fire in a hospital in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, in June.
A total of seven people were killed in fires in hospitals in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in May last year.
In October 2020, an oxygen tank exploded in a hospital, but no one was injured.
In terms of the number of infections, Russia is the fourth most severely affected country by the pandemic in the world.
According to an AFP count, almost 6.5 million infections with the coronavirus have been detected in the country.
jok / AFP
