Siberians fight the pandemic by giving weary doctors a lift

IRKUTSK, Russia (AP) — As coronavirus resurged across Russia this fall, one of the most common complaints from people with symptoms who were self-isolating at home was that they had to wait hours or sometimes days before a visiting doctor would arrive to check on them.

Record-breaking numbers of confirmed infections have strained the country's health care system to its limits and left doctors all across Russia inundated with demands for house calls for virus patients.

“We have already started to choke, with our doctors making 20-25 house calls a day,” Vera Klyuyeva, head of internal medicine at an outpatient clinic in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, told The Associated Press in October. “They were just falling off their feet.”

In late September, the Irkutsk region was reporting around 80 new coronavirus cases a day. By December, the number had more than tripled to over 270 daily new infections.

Overall, Russia has reported over 2.5 million coronavirus cases — the fourth-largest caseload in the world — and over 44,000 deaths.

Physicians in outpatient facilities have to tend to those who were self-isolating at home with mild or moderate symptoms and needed to take a test or get treatment recommendations. Often, the Russian medical workers have had to go on foot, as their clinics don't have enough cars to go around.

In Irkutsk, that changed in October, when a group of volunteers came to the rescue, offering the simple service of driving medical workers to their home visits.

Vadim Kostenko, 37-year-old local entrepreneur, came up with the idea after speaking to medical workers about what could help best. He said doctors were able to visit 70% more patients when they had someone to drive them than when they went on foot.

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