While heavy traffic is no longer an issue on Moscow’s roads due to the coronavirus lockdown, the city’s emergency medical response teams have encountered another unexpected problem – long lines of ambulances outside hospitals.

A massive queue of the vehicles was filmed outside the War Veterans Hospital in the north of the capital on Friday. The footage provided by RT’s Ruptly video agency showed vans emblazoned with red crosses occupying not only the approach road to the hospital – recently repurposed to treat Covid-19 patients – but also most of the neighboring street.

It wasn’t an isolated incident, as another video showed dozens of ambulances jammed on the road leading to a hospital in the suburban town of Khimki. The vehicles contained people with suspected Covid-19 or pneumonia, who waited for hours.

Officials from the medical crisis center in charge of Russia’s battle against the coronavirus told RT that the queues of ambulances appeared outside some hospitals due to “the current epidemiological situation, which saw the flow of patients increasing in recent days.”

Such a thing would’ve been “unacceptable” if the medical facilities were working under normal circumstances, but the medics said they are under increased pressure at the moment. They apologized to patients for the inconvenience, but added that the complications with admitting people to hospitals “weren’t of a systematic nature.”

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The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia currently stands at 13,584, with 106 people having died. More than half of the infected (8852) and fatalities (58) are in Moscow, which is the largest city not only in Russia, but in the whole of Europe, and also the country’s main transport hub.

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