Two senior health officials in southern Russia have left their positions after the start of investigations into the deaths of several coronavirus patients due to an oxygen shortage in a hospital, authorities said Tuesday.
Russia’s health watchdog said last week it was investigating claims by hospital workers and officials in the city of Rostov-on-Don that 13 patients died when their oxygen supplies ran out on Oct. 11. The watchdog, Roszdravnadzor, said following the scandal that it will ask all 85 Russian regions to report any medical oxygen shortages at hospitals.
Rostov region’s health minister Tatyana Bykovskaya retired in the wake of the scandal, the regional authorities said, while the head of the city’s healthcare management Nadezhda Levitskaya was fired, the city’s news website 161.ru cited municipal authorities as saying.
Rostov-on-Don’s administration has denied disruptions to the supply of oxygen at the city hospital and suggested that a leak may have caused the shortage.
One of the two physicians who worked the evening shift at the hospital’s Covid-19 wing on the day in question recounted a tense two hours of critically low oxygen levels followed by complete depletion in an interview with the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
“Patients immediately panic and try to get oxygen from elsewhere, gasping for air like fish pulled out of the water,” anesthesiologist Artur Toporov said.
“We talked to them,” Toporov, 27, told Novaya Gazeta. “There was nothing else we could help them with.”
Rostov is Russia’s sixth most-affected region, with 29,683 Covid-19 cases and 789 deaths confirmed by the national coronavirus information center.
Russia has reported record numbers of new infections and deaths over the past week as disease experts warn that the regions could see a second wave that is 10 times worse than the first.
Oxygen Supply Fails on Russian Segment of ISS, Crew Not in Danger
The oxygen supply system has failed in a module on the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) but the crew is in no danger, Russian space agency Roscosmos said Thursday.
The oxygen supply system on the Zvezda module on the orbital lab failed late on Wednesday but a second system on the American segment is operating normally, a Roscosmos spokesperson told AFP.
«Nothing threatens the security of the crew and the ISS,» said the spokesperson, adding this repair work to fix the issue would be carried out on Thursday.
The issue arose after three new crew — two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut — reached the ISS on Wednesday to bring the number of current crew on board to six.
The problem is the latest incident on the ISS — whose first module was launched over two decades ago in 1998 — after the crew in August detected an air leak on board.
Roscosmos emphasized at the time that the leak was not significant and posed no danger. But part of the problem was detecting precisely where it came from.
The crew believe that they have now found the source of of the leak. The Roscosmos spokesperson said that they would receive precise instructions from mission control to carry out future work on the problem.
Quoted by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency, veteran Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka said that the Russian equipment aboard the ISS was well past its use-by date.
«All modules of the Russian segment are exhausted,» said Padalka, who holds the world record for most days spent in space. He added that the equipment should only be used for 15 years whereas it was now two decades old.
