Several hospitals in Irkutsk had imposed three-week quarantines, the news outlet People of Baikal reported on October 4. City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, No. 3, and No. 10 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Hospital are closed, the outlet reported. Relatives of a woman giving birth at one of Irkutsk’s maternity hospitals told the outlet that it had also imposed a quarantine.
A health care source told the outlet that doctors in Irkutsk “are already openly talking about plague,” though documents sent to the hospitals do not mention that diagnosis. “With pneumonic plague, quarantine restrictions are not limited to selected facilities — they are imposed on all medical facilities at once,” the source told People of Baikal.
Shortly after People of Baikal’s report appeared, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, issued a statement. The agency said “the public health situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable” and that it had implemented “a series of special measures.”
The measures were prompted by a case of “pneumonia of unknown cause” in an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. Rospotrebnadzor emphasized that no “microorganisms associated with her professional work” had been found in the deceased woman’s body.
On October 3, masks became mandatory at the Irkutsk Aluminum Plant in Shelekhov. The plant’s director, Artyom Fominykh, called it a preventive measure. “Better safe than sorry — take precautions,” he said on his Telegram channel.
Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old patient at the local district hospital, died last week in Shelekhov, a satellite city of Irkutsk. Reporters learned that she was also a laboratory technician at the Anti-Plague Institute. She was hospitalized on September 29 and died two days later. Media reports at the time gave two accounts of what had happened.
According to one account, Shipilova was admitted with pneumonic plague after returning from Thailand. According to the other, she had accidentally broken a test tube containing the plague pathogen. Rospotrebnadzor says there were no accidents involving pathogenic microorganisms at the institute.
Meanwhile, the Irkutsk regional authorities had said nothing about the patient’s death or a possible case of plague. On October 2, Governor Igor Kobzev said he had met with Russia’s chief public health officer, Anna Popova, had flown to Irkutsk in person He said the meeting was prompted by “reports of a suspected case of a particularly dangerous infectious disease in a resident of the region.”
But Alexey Tsydenov, the head of neighboring Buryatia, said that “the woman who died of plague in the Irkutsk region had not visited Buryatia.” His post was later edited to read “the woman who may have died of plague.”
On October 3, the city administration in Baikalsk, in the Irkutsk region, urged people not to travel to Shelekhov “because of unofficial reports that a person in Shelekhov had been diagnosed with plague.” It later deleted the post. The national television channel REN TV also deleted five social media posts about the spread of plague in Shelekhov.
People of Baikal previously reported that residents had noticed people wearing protective suits, masks, and gloves on Shelekhov’s streets last week. On October 1, according to the outlet’s sources, FSB officers began escorting ambulances taking people who had been in contact with Shipilova for examinations. Izvestia reported that 197 people had been quarantined as of October 2. Rospotrebnadzor said they showed no signs of illness.