Biosecurity

Waiting for the 'Coronavirus Tsunami' to Hit St. Petersburg

A huge tent stands in the courtyard of St. Petersburg Hospital No. 2 — an extra emergency ward if the hospital receiving ward can’t cope with a surge of coronavirus cases. The hospital, one of the city’s largest, has 1,200 beds. At the end of March, the director was told to get ready to receive Covid-19 patients, train its staff and stock up inventories.

St. Petersburg’s Covid-19 statistics are less dire than Moscow’s. The number of confirmed cases has been fluctuating between 35 and 120 per day over the past week, in contrast with Moscow’s number rising to over 3,000 new cases a day. On April 14, 799 cases had been confirmed in St. Petersburg.

So far, the tent has not been used. But the hospital’s staff say they are in the “calm before the storm.”

What they don’t know is how devastating the Covid-19 tsunami will be when it hits.
A day in the new life

“We are torn between hope and uncertainty, and the uncertainty is really the hardest part right now,” Pyotr Puzdryak told The Moscow Times. Puzdryak is a vascular surgeon who was retrained to deal with infectious diseases.

“We are sailing through troubled waters. There is so much we don’t know for a fact, from the true numbers of people infected and recovered — a lot of people must have already had Covid-19 without even noticing — to how many people had it and died before testing began.