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| Five Covid-19 patients die in Russia hospital fire | Five Covid-19 patients die in Russia hospital fire |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| A fire at a St Petersburg hospital has killed five coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit. | |
| The blaze was apparently started by a short-circuit in a ventilator, Russian news agencies reported. | |
| 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. | |
| All of the patients who died had been on ventilators. | |
| "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. | |
| The news comes as the country is starting to ease lockdown restrictions. Construction, farming and factory workers are resuming their duties. | |
| 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. |