Doctors under quarantine at Ufa hospital appeal to Russian authorities to investigate mass COVID-19 outbreak

Doctors at the Kuvatov Republican Clinical Hospital in Ufa are calling for an investigation into the mass coronavirus outbreak at their facility, appealing to President Vladimir Putin, the head of the government, and the Investigative Committee chairman. The medics shared their appeal in the form of a video, uploaded to the YouTube channel BashMEDpersonal. It was then picked up by the independent television station Dozhd.

The medics suspect that the leadership of Bashkortostan is covering up the scale of the COVID-19 epidemic in the region. 

They also claim that the coronavirus outbreak at the Kuvatov Republican Clinical Hospital began in March, but the hospital administration did nothing, despite the fact that they knew about it.

“We demand an honest and open investigation into the events at the hospital, which led to the spread of the coronavirus infection throughout the republic. Do not hide the test results. We do not believe the laboratory data, which is under the control of the [republican authorities],” the doctors say in the video.

On April 5, an elderly patient diagnosed with diabetes and pneumonia died at the Kuvatov Republican Clinical Hospital. Autopsy results revealed that the patient had COVID-19. The hospital was closed for quarantine and on April 10, the regional authorities confirmed that 170 people inside the hospital had tested positive for the coronavirus. A second round of testing showed that an additional 52 people had contracted the disease by April 13.

The hospital has since become the largest hotbed of infection in Bashkortostan: due to the number of patients transferred from the Kuvatov Republican Clinical Hospital, several local hospitals had to be placed under quarantine, as well. Bashkortostan was recently ranked third among regions with the highest number of deaths from the coronavirus in Russia.

On the morning of April 30, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 7,099 new coronavirus infections in the past day, bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 106,498 patients. Another 101 people reportedly died from the disease, raising Russia’s total number of fatalities caused by COVID-19 to 1,073.