Four hospitals in the Siberian city of Irkutsk have denied social media claims that they were shut for a three-week plague quarantine, Lenta.ru reported on October 5.

The rumours follow the death of an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, after which Russia placed nearly 200 people under observation, and Rospotrebnadzor then denied that she had died of plague. The shifting official line from Moscow has worried governments worldwide, while the European Commission and Washington have both called for open and timely reporting.

The posts, which circulated on Telegram, alleged that the authorities were concealing an outbreak. The Ivano-Matryonin Children's Clinical Hospital rejected this.

"The hospital is working as normal without changes," the hospital said in a statement cited by local media. It added that emergency patients are accepted around the clock and that scheduled appointments continue to run to timetable.

Irkutsk City Clinical Hospital No. 1 said in its channel on the government-controlled "Max messenger" that reports of its closure and a plague outbreak in the region were untrue, IntelliNews learned.

It said no cases of pneumonic plague had been officially confirmed in the city. City Clinical Hospitals No. 3 and No. 10 also announced no change to their work, and Rospotrebnadzor has not confirmed the claims.

The rumours began after the death of Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old employee of the institute, who was admitted to hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov with severe pneumonia on September 29 and died on October 1. Early reports said she had broken a test tube containing live plague bacteria while collecting samples, and that she had pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs and can pass between people through respiratory droplets.

At least 197 people who had been in contact with her were placed under observation, 189 of them in hospital, and Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said all had tested negative and showed no signs of illness. The Shelekhov district hospital closed its inpatient ward, public events were postponed and residents were asked to limit visits to Shelekhov and neighbouring towns. The Irkutsk Aluminium Smelter, operated by Rusal, introduced mandatory masks for its 2,154 employees.

Rospotrebnadzor later said she died of pneumonia of unknown aetiology. It said tests found none of the microorganisms associated with the pathogens she handled at work, and that a commission found no evidence of a laboratory accident or of infection during a trip to Thailand. Tests on her contacts found two cases of COVID-19 and two of rhinovirus, but no plague, they claimed. Gennady Onishchenko, an epidemiologist and former head of Rospotrebnadzor, said the illness was likely not plague.

The European Commission said it was monitoring the situation very closely and was in touch with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Uzbekistan tightened sanitary controls at its borders, although no plague cases have been confirmed there.

The World Health Organization has identified active natural plague foci across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan covering about 1.8mn square kilometres, and the last confirmed human case in Russia was in 2016, when a 10-year-old boy in the Altai Republic was infected after handling a marmot. IntelliNews has looked at why the disease never fully disappeared.