Nurse fined half month's salary by Putin officials for unzipping her hazmat suit during coronavirus inspection
A Russian nurse treating coronavirus patients was penalized for unzipping her hazmat suit and removing her eye protector when her hospital was visited by government officials. Anastasia Myravyova, a 20-year-old medical student, was working in a Covid-19 hospital when senior officials spotted her, The Sun reported. Chief sanitary doctor Natalia Bashketova and Governor Alexander Beglov caught the young nurse when they were holding an inspection at the St Petersburg hospital. Anastasia was subsequently taken to court and fined 15,000 roubles ($216) for failing to be “a model of discipline, cleanliness, and tidiness."
According to the report, the penalty was more than half of her monthly earnings at the emergency Lenexpo coronavirus hospital. Soon after the news made rounds of the internet, it sparked a nationwide outpouring of sympathy for the health worker and well-wishers quickly raised money for her to pay off the fine. "I'm very touched, many thanks to those kind people,” said Anastasia. “At that moment I felt very bad. There wasn’t enough air, so I freed myself a little, not at the right time. I unbuttoned and removed my hood…There is no ventilation, these suits do not breathe. You work as if you’re in a steam room.” "It was bad all the time. I left the ward and just didn’t feel that I could breathe. And the temperature rose," she added.
After Anastasia's supporters raised more cash than the amount of the fine, she paid the excess to a charity dedicated to children with cancer. "I am in my last year at a medical college and graduating this summer,” she said. “When there were not enough doctors (to cope with the pandemic emergency), they called for students." Anastasia noted how she has not had a day off since starting on May 4. “You work six hours, then 12 to relax, and so on without days off," she explained.
According to the report, more than 5,000 medics in St. Petersburg have been infected with the novel coronavirus.
The fine follows a scandal last month which saw a nurse in Tula disciplined after she decided to ditch her uniform and opted to wear only bare essentials beneath her PPE gown while treating male patients in the coronavirus ward of a hospital. The incident took place at a hospital in Tula, 100 miles south of Moscow, where a picture of the nurse wearing the revealing outfit was taken by a patient in the ward. The photo soon went viral and showed the Russian nurse wearing nothing but "lingerie" beneath her transparent protective gown. According to Daily Mail, the patient said there were no complaints received as such from the male patients about the inappropriate nature of clothing on the nurse, who was identified only as Nadia, although he admitted there was "some embarrassment" among his roommates.
Apparently the reason given by the nurse, who is in her 20s, was that she was feeling "too hot" wearing her uniform underneath her protective gown and hence decided to ditch it altogether. While it was earlier reported that she might have been wearing "lingerie," it later emerged that she was wearing a two-piece swimsuit.