Several coronavirus patients have been killed and about 150 evacuated after a fire in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Russia, according to the country's emergency ministry.Local media reports said at least five patients were killed while unnamed sources from the ministry told the Interfax and Tass news agencies that the cause of the fire was overloaded ventilators.
"Ventilators are at their limit. According to preliminary data, there was an overload and the machine ignited, which caused the fire," one source told Interfax.
The Saint George hospital had recently been re-purposed to treat coronavirus patients, Tass reported.
On Saturday, one person was killed when a fire broke out at a Moscow hospital dedicated to coronavirus patients.
On Tuesday, Russia reported 10,899 new cases of the coronavirus in the preceding 24 hours, bringing the nationwide total to 232,243, the third-highest total worldwide.
The country's coronavirus response centre said the death toll from the virus rose by 107 people to 2,116.
The government says it has carried out more than 5.6 million tests and Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Monday vowed to double capacity to 300,000 tests daily by mid-May.
The ministry did not reveal the death toll after Tuesday's fire at the Saint George hospital in St Petersburg.
The emergencies services said in a statement on Saturday that more than 200 people were evacuated from Spasokukotsky Hospital in the northern suburbs of the Russian capital."The fire started in one of the rooms on the first floor," it said, adding that it was quickly extinguished.
Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, confirmed reports that a patient had died and said those evacuated would be transferred to other hospitals.
"The causes of this incident will be thoroughly investigated," Sobyanin wrote on Twitter.
To date, Russia has registered almost 210,000 confirmed infections and more than 1,900 related deaths.
More than half of the country's cases and deaths have been recorded in Moscow, a sprawling city of 12.7 million.
The capital and several other regions have been on lockdown since late March to try and stem the spread of the coronavirus.
This week, Russia overtook France and Germany to become the country with the fifth-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world. The top four hardest-hit countries include: The United States, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.
