Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he has the
coronavirus under control and that everything is just fine in the former Soviet
Union. He recently stated: “All levels of power are working in an organized,
responsible and timely way. The situation is under full control. All of our
society is united in front of the common threat.” Nothing to see here. It’s all
good, says Vlad.
Well, three
doctors who were treating coronavirus patients have fallen out of
hospital windows lately. But that could happen anywhere, anytime, right?
Doctors fall out of hospital windows all the time, no? Surely it is just a
coincidence that at least two of the three and maybe all three had recently
complained about the lack of personal protective gear in the country.
In all
seriousness, this sounds Clintonesque. Doctors do not, in fact, simply fall out
of hospital windows. (“Damn, that’s the fifth one we’ve lost this week!”) I’ve never
heard of this happening before. If Russian hospitals are anything like those in
America, their exterior walls are built out, leaving a shelf for patients’
flowers, etc., and the windows, if any, don’t come down very far from the
ceiling. And those windows are thick double-panes. It would be damn near
impossible to accidentally fall through or out of one, even if it were open…to
take advantage of the warm Russian April air, no doubt. Funny that they just
happened to question their government’s readiness to combat COVID-19 before
accidentally stumbling out the windows.
Alexander
Shulepov, a doctor in Voronezh, located roughly 320 miles south of Moscow, is
currently in serious condition after tumbling from a second-floor hospital
window, according to local state television. He was reportedly receiving
treatment for coronavirus at the time, yet had been forced to continue working.
Elena
Nepomnyashchaya, acting head doctor of a hospital in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk,
recently died after allegedly falling out a window during a meeting with
health officials in which they discussed turning the clinic into a facility
for treating the coronavirus. Nepomnyashchaya was supposedly against the idea,
due to the lack of protective gear in the hospital. Apparently, the meeting
with officials somehow caused her to lose her balance and sense of direction.
Natalya
Lebedeva was the head of the emergency medical service at Star City, the main
training base for Russian cosmonauts. She, too, was being treated for
coronavirus, according to a hospital within the Federal Biomedical Agency, when
she, too, suffered a “tragic accident.”
It
would have been easier—and more believable-- if government officials had said
these doctors were all hit by lightning or were abducted by aliens. (Shulepov
could be recovering or have escaped.)
It’s not just the three Russian doctors who
went out the window. In fact, they almost certainly did not. The credibility of
the government officials, on the other hand, most certainly did.
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