“The morgue is this way,” says the guard to the people who pass flowers in their hands. At Mariïnskaya Hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia, the new wave of coronavirus due to the Delta variant is wreaking havoc.
“Since mid-June there have been more and more people. It’s the Covid”, confides, laconic, the guardian of this establishment converted a few weeks ago into a hospital for coronavirus patients, to face the increase rapid contamination in the second city of the country.
Russia last week recorded several daily death records in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the main foci. The country also records new contaminations at the highest since mid-January, when it came out of a second deadly wave.
The situation is worsening while the vaccination of the population is very sluggish against a background of mistrust. According to the Gogov site, which aggregates data from regions and media due to lack of official statistics, only 18.3 million of 146 million Russians received both doses, or 12.57%.
In the “red zone” of the Mariïnskaya hospital, almost all of the 760 available beds are occupied. The establishment is located right in the center of this city of 5.4 million inhabitants, very popular with tourists.
“It’s quiet in the morning. Usually, most patients arrive in the afternoon,” says Dr Alexeï Lepakov, pointing to the room where the patients are received, where there are a few patients brought by ambulance.
Dressed in a protective suit, gloved hands and a mask on his face, Mr. Lepakov must also, like all the hospital staff, work for hours in the exceptional heat that has fallen in recent weeks on Saint -Petersburg, with record temperatures for the season of up to 30 ° C.
“It’s hard, we sometimes lose up to three kilos a day from the heat, but we got used to it,” says Lepakov.
– “You have to be vaccinated” –
Intensive care is comprehensive. Here, caregivers and their teams have a hard time saving patients who find themselves between life and death. Under artificial respirator, some patients are placed in a prone position.
“At the moment, there are 24 patients in intensive care. All the beds are occupied,” notes the head of the department Pavel Ermakov.
“People come to us in serious condition. To get by, a lot depends on the physical condition of the patient: apart from the Covid, everyone suffers from other disorders such as diabetes or overweight”, explains- he does.
Within half an hour, AFP saw staff carry two bodies of patients in black body bags.
“Sorry, but it’s resuscitation here. Fortunately, most patients are doing it anyway,” says the doctor.
This is the case with Mikhail Konovalov, who spent a few days in intensive care before starting to recover.
“Thank you to the doctors who saved me. After all this, I can tell everyone: you have to get vaccinated,” said this 45-year-old employee of the city’s airport, sitting on his bed. ‘hospital.
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