Bashkortostan is afraid of a repetition of the Italian scenario of the coronavirus pandemic. Moreover, the main culprit could be the management of the republic’s main medical institution — the Ufa Kuwatov Clinical Hospital, which has become the main breeding ground of the epidemic.
Currently, there are relatively few officially confirmed cases of infection in the republic — 150 people. However, there is a high risk of infection among some 3,000 current and former patients of this hospital and a significant portion of its medical staff — about 170 doctors and nurses.
The drama of the situation lies in the fact that a significant part of the potentially infected persons from the Kuwatov Republican Hospital were previously transferred from Ufa to hospitals in other cities and districts of the Republic, such as Sterlitamak, Oktyabrsky, Neftekamsk, Kumeratau, Sibai, Belebey, Birsk, Buzdyak, Dyurtul and Tuymazy.
How did it happen? On April 5, the first patient with confirmed coronavirus died in the hospital, after which the management made a decision to impose quarantine. But according to the head of the hospital’s rheumatology department, Rimma Kamalova, this was just the tip of the iceberg, as doctors had been sounding the alarm for about a month about the increasing number of pneumonia cases that were simply not being tested for coronavirus. At the same time, the hospital and doctors were operating as usual — admitting new patients and transferring old ones to other hospitals.
27 doctors from the hospital, who are currently under quarantine, stated in their appeal published yesterday that the hospital management not only ignored their signals of negligence, but deliberately blocked the identification of the coronavirus. Potentially infected individuals were not tested at first, and when they were, the test results mysteriously disappeared. According to the doctors, all of this was done in order not to interrupt the flow of paying patients coming to the hospital, which brings significant income to its management.
At present, the republic’s health management has reluctantly admitted that those who were supposed to fight the epidemic have become its main source of epidemiological threat. At present, however, the heads of the republic’s health care system and their PR representatives are busy shifting the blame to each other, and the PR representative of Bashkortostan’s Health Minister Maxim Zabelin has begun deleting negative comments on this issue from his social media accounts.
As a result, Russia’s most populous republic is now afraid of a repeat of the Italian pandemic scenario. But how many more cases are there in Russia, where the coronavirus epidemic is hidden behind unaccounted statistics of pneumonia cases?