Moscow closes its first clinic due to an outbreak of COVID-19 The chief physician is on a ventilator, and many locals think she’s to blame for spreading coronavirus

Over the weekend, Moscow officials closed the central outpatient clinic for the Mitino District, where local residents now fear a new outbreak of coronavirus. Outpatient Clinic № 180 is now being decontaminated from top to bottom and the facility’s chief physician was placed on a ventilator on Saturday. Staff will be allowed to return to work only after mass testing. This is the first time Moscow has had to close an entire clinic because of the coronavirus epidemic. Elsewhere in the city, admission and hospitalization at the Blokhin Oncology Center are still suspended because of concerns about COVID-19’s spread.

All operations at Outpatient Clinic № 180 are “suspended up to and including April 20, 2020,” reads a sign posted at the building’s entrance. “The clinic is being decontaminated,” a security guard at the gates told Meduza. “The building was shut down because some ‘wiseguy’ patient came in, already infected [with coronavirus]. Every floor he was on is now quarantined for two weeks,” explained an operator at the clinic’s telephone hotline. 

Vladimir Chermenev, the chairman of the Moscow North-Western Administrative Okrug’s Health Workers Union, confirmed to Meduza that the clinic’s chief physician, Yulia Sergeyeva, and her assistant deputy have also tested positive for COVID-19. “The chief physician is sick. The other doctors are being tested,” a source close to the local government in the Mitino District told Meduza.

“[Sergeyeva] is at Hospital № 52 in serious condition, but all they want to say is that she just has pneumonia in both lungs,” an employee at a hospital in the area told Meduza. The help desk at Hospital № 52 verified that Sergeyeva is now being treated there and described her condition as “extremely serious — she’s on a ventilator.” Operators at Clinic № 180’s phone hotline declined to comment about their chief physician’s medical condition, citing patient confidentiality. 

“The most important thing now is to break the chain of transmission!” Sergeyeva wrote in a Facebook post on March 30 — the last time she updated her page. Some of Sergeyeva’s colleagues, however, have accused her of carelessness in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.

“She has a home in Spain where she was vacationing. When she got back, she called five supervisors from five other outpatient clinics to a meeting,” says a physician at a hospital in the Mitino District. “Clinic № 180 is the main facility for the whole area, so Sergeyeva called in the supervisors from the Strogino and Skhodnya branches and now all these doctors are sick.” On social media, meanwhile, locals in Mitino say a general practitioner and an ultrasound specialist at Hospital № 229 (a branch of Clinic № 180) have tested positive for COVID-19. 

Meduza was unable to obtain Yulia Sergeyeva’s flight history in March and could not corroborate her supposed trips to Spain (where she owns no property, according to her financial disclosures available at the Moscow Health Department’s website). She hasn’t posted anything on social media that indicates any ties to Spain. 

Two local residents and a doctor who works in the Mitino District told Meduza that they also believe several of Sergeyeva’s subordinates have contracted coronavirus. “Since late March, there’s been suspicion that she was sick,” says one man living in Clinic № 180’s neighborhood. “And when the diagnosis was confirmed, a panic broke out. They tested everybody, closed the hospital, and sent everybody home.”

According to the schedules now posted on Clinic № 180’s website, most of the specialists on staff aren’t available for new appointments until April 21. (Doctors are either “out sick” or “on vacation.”) “Those who are healthy continue to work at other branches,” an operator at the clinic’s phone hotline told Meduza, declining to clarify how many employees are already back on the job. Physicians at Clinic № 180 ignored Meduza’s messages on social media. 

Officials at Clinic № 180 do not deny that the facility has been closed and quarantined because of coronavirus, but spokespeople blame the outbreak on an irresponsible patient, not anyone on staff. “A real ‘A+’ patient came in, instead of staying home. He walked through nearly the entire clinic. What were we supposed to do? We immediately isolated everyone he passed,” explained the clinic’s hotline operator.

Moscow’s Health Department did not answer Meduza’s questions about the status of Dr. Sergeyeva and her colleagues. City officials also declined to respond to questions about the potential need for mass COVID-19 testing in the Mitino District, where residents have voiced concerns that doctors at Clinic № 180 may have unwittingly spread the disease. “They went on house calls without protective equipment,” Meduza learned from a source who asked to remain anonymous. 

Yulia Sergeyeva has been Clinic № 180’s chief physician since 2016. On March 22, two weeks before the facility was quarantined, Sergeyeva wrote on Facebook about the epidemiological safety measures being introduced at the clinic. “Checking the temperatures of all staff and patients as they enter the building has become obligatory, if not familiar. People are separated and patients with temperatures are brought in through a separate entrance; they’re admitted into a containment room. Both staff and visitors in all buildings must strictly adhere to mask requirements,” Sergeyeva explained.

Yulia Sergeyeva isn’t the first medical worker in Russia suspected of spreading the coronavirus. After returning from a trip to Spain, Stavropol’s chief infectious diseases specialist Irina Sannikova declined to self-isolate and went back to work. State investigators later charged her with felony negligence and criminal concealment of circumstances vital to public health. According to express-tests, at least 11 of Sannikova’s colleagues have contracted COVID-19. 

Earlier this month, Professor Elena Vasilyeva, the chief physician at Davydovsky Clinical Hospital № 23, was also diagnosed with COVID-19. According to the Telegram channel Mash, which was the first media outlet to report Vasilyeva’s illness, doctors are now administering coronavirus tests to more than 500 people who came into contact with her. 

In Russia’s Ulyanovsk region, meanwhile, several new cases of COVID-19 have been linked to a nurse named Valentina Prusakova who went back to work after returning from the United Arab Emirates without self-isolating or informing her supervisors about the trip. Her entire hospital was subsequently closed for decontamination. 

There have been coronavirus outbreaks at multiple hospitals in the Komi Republic, where local news reports suggest the source could be Andrey Kern, a physician who recently returned from abroad. Dr. Kerch’s daughter (who asked us not to disclose her name) told Meduza that the allegations against her father are unjustified.