Inside Russia's largest emergency room, as COVID-19 deaths soar

For more than 200 years, Russia's largest emergency department has treated some of Moscow's most critically ill.

Its patients have included victims of the Napoleonic wars and deadly terrorist attacks in the 90s and 2000s. Now five floors of the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine have been turned into a red zone, where some 100 COVID-19 patients are cordoned off from the rest of the hospital.

Some are on oxygen. Others are on ventilators. But all of them are unvaccinated, says Dr. Yevgeny Ryabov, an administrator in the hospital's COVID department.

"This is some kind of indifference and, to some degree, ignorance," he told CBC News as he did morning rounds on Monday with a large team of doctors and nurses.

CBC was invited into the hospital's red zone this week to see how staff are trying to treat an unprecedented surge in infected patients — a deluge which one official described as a weight caving in on the health-care system.

While the entire country has rolled out various COVID-19 restrictions, including a national non-working week and a partial lockdown in Moscow, it hasn't been enough to motivate half of Russia's adult population to get vaccinated, even as deaths have reached record levels.

Russia's national coronavirus task force has reported more than 1,100 COVID-19 deaths each day for the past week, but some in the health sector suggest it is a dramatic underestimate of the total loss and the scale of the ongoing crisis. 

Before doctors and nurses are allowed to enter the red zone at the Sklifosovsky Institute, they have to put on several protective layers, including a gown, hood, goggles, a respirator and two layers of gloves. 

The rounds on Monday started at 8 a.m. — earlier than normal because staff wanted to attend a memorial for a retired colleague who recently died of COVID-19.

In the past 18 months, this hospital lost 10 of its current and retired staff to the virus.

"This is the most difficult, when you have to bury the people that you know very well," said Dr. Sergei Petrikov, the director of the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine.

He led a large medical team through each room, where they reviewed medical images and charts for patients in various stages of medical distress.

While some patients were sitting upright, hooked up to supplemental oxygen, others were lying on their stomachs in a prone position in an attempt to try to help their lungs take in more air. 

Several patients were on ventilators, and a few were hooked up to extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines, which pump and oxygenate a person's blood outside of the body. It is known as a last resort when it comes to life support.