MOSCOW, March 27. /TASS/. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin opened a new coronavirus hospital, deployed at Moscow’s Filatov hospital number 15. The hospital was completely refurbished for suspected and confirmed coronavirus patients. In needed, pregnant women could also be transferred to the facility.
"Moscow continues to allocate hospital capacities to fight coronavirus. Today, we open this largest coronavirus hospital for 1,300 patients; 2,700 employees will work here, this is the nation’s largest coronavirus facility. We hope that we won’t need all these capacities, but if we do, Filatov hospital is ready," Sobyanin said.
The clinic is completely refurbished and is equipped with all necessary equipment to provide assistance to patients with confirmed or suspected coronavirus infection. The hospital can take up to 1,300 patients, including a maternity ward for 170 patients and intensive care unit with 111 beds, which could be increased to 180. The hospital is equipped with 146 ventilators and two extracorporeal membrane oxygenation systems.
The mayor added that some 2,000 people are employed in renovation in a bid to prepare the city hospitals to situation that the coronavirus infection may cause. The mayor underscored that the hospital employees made a selfless decision to work in such epidemiologic situation, adding that every employee to work in the coronavirus hotbed was instructed on how to deal with the infection.
A pneumonia outbreak caused by the COVID-19 virus (previously known as 2019-nCoV) was reported in China’s city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center with a population of 12 million, in late December 2019. Cases of the new coronavirus have also been reported from 160 countries, including Russia.
According to the latest update, the novel coronavirus cases across the globe have neared 522,000, with more than 23,500 fatalities. The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially described the situation with the novel coronavirus as a pandemic.
Moscow reports 704 coronavirus cases.