A fire that set off at a St Petersburg hospital has killed five coronavirus patients who had been receiving ventilator treatment in an intensive care unit.
The blaze was apparently started by a short-circuit in a ventilator, the BBC reports citing Russian news agencies.
The fire has now been contained and 150 people have been evacuated from the hospital, the country's emergency ministry said. It is not clear how many people have been injured.
"The ventilators are working to their limits. Preliminary indications are that it was overloaded and caught fire, and that was the cause," a source at St Petersburg emergencies department told the Interfax news agency.
Russia now has the third-highest number of confirmed infections worldwide. On Monday, it reported a record daily rise of 11,656 cases, bringing the official total to 221,344.
That means Russia now has more confirmed cases than both Italy and the UK.
