Coronavirus: ‘Huge influx’ of patients with massive lines at Russian hospitals

Video taken in Moscow shows enormous lines of ambulances waiting at a hospital as the country’s coronavirus outbreak worsens.

Russia’s hospitals are being overwhelmed by “a huge influx” of coronavirus patients.

Ambulances lined up at hospitals in a Moscow suburb Saturday.

One driver told Reuters he had waited for more than 15 hours to drop off a patient who was suspected of having the infection.

Russia has reported 13,584 COVID-19 cases and 106 deaths.

Long lines of ambulances outside a hospital in Moscow. Picture: Twitter via Olga Lautman

“The situation in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mostly in Moscow, is quite tense because the number of sick people is growing,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview last week on Russian state TV.

“There is a huge influx of patients. We are seeing hospitals in Moscow working extremely intensely, in heroic, emergency mode.”

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said last week that the city would introduce digital permits to enforce the lockdown across the city.

Residents would have to request permits to travel on public transit, and by taxi and by car, Reuters reported.

Moscow’s mayor has detailed the system under which most of the Russian capital’s 12 million people will be required to have passes to move around the city by vehicle.

The move comes as coronavirus infections grow markedly despite orders for most people to stay home; Moscow has recorded 8,852 cases of infection, more than 65 percent of Russia’s total.

A communal worker sprays disinfectant on the door of a residential building in Moscow on April 11, 2020, amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Picture: AFP

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin says that as of Wednesday anyone using personal or public transport in the city must have electronic passes stating his destination.

He said on Friday the city was far from reaching the peak of the outbreak, and it was merely in its “foothills”.

Passes allowing trips to a grocery store will be issued twice a week per person. Residents under 14 years old, military service members, law-enforcement officers and state employees are excepted.

“Unfortunately this is a necessity,” Mr Sobyanin wrote on his website.

“It is needed to protect the lives and health of many Muscovites, to overcome this calamity and to return to normal life.”

With New York Post and AP