Donald Trump says he has a call scheduled with Vladimir Putin about the plague death in Siberia. The Kremlin says no arrangements have been made.
The story broke Oct. 2, five days ago. We have known Darya Shipilova's name since then, and we still know almost nothing else. Trump told reporters on the South Lawn Tuesday that the call would come "very soon." On Wednesday Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "no substantive arrangements have been made."
The story is twelve days old. On Sept. 25, Darya Shipilova, 28, a technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, broke a test tube holding the plague agent, according to regional reporters at Lyudi Baikala and Novaya Gazeta. She went into the hospital Sept. 29. She died the night of Oct. 1-2 at Shelekhov District Hospital. Rospotrebnadzor, the state health agency that runs the institute, says there was no accident and that she died of "pneumonia of unknown origin."
Russia has given the world three numbers. State media counts 197 contacts identified and 189 hospitalized. On Tuesday Moscow told the World Health Organization that "100% of the contacts" had completed medical monitoring and no dangerous pathogens were found.
Nobody has published who the 197 are, where the eight who were never hospitalized went, or any inquiry behind the agency's one-line finding that nothing broke. And on the day Moscow told Geneva everyone was clear, Irkutsk City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, 3 and 10 and the city's children's hospital were under quarantine.
Nobody quarantines four city hospitals for a cold.
