Ukraine's overburdened doctors in desperate virus fight

CHERNIVTSI, Ukraine (AP) — A breathing machine at a Ukrainian hospital breaks down, leaving a coronavirus patient gasping helplessly for air. Dr. Olha Kobevko rushes from room to room to see if there is an electrician among her other patients who can fix it.

Eventually, she figures out a way to get the device working again on her own.

“We are like in a war situation here, like on a front line!” she exclaims in despair.

Kobevko, 37, is the only infectious disease specialist at the infection division of a hospital in the western city of Chernivtsi that is supposed to accommodate 60 patients but now holds about 100.

The deplorable conditions — broken or substandard equipment, a lack of drugs, low wages — reflects the meltdown of Ukraine’s health care system, which has been quickly overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic even with the country's relatively low number of cases.

Ukraine's corruption-plagued economy has been weakened by six years of war with Russia-backed separatists in the east. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s year-old administration inherited an underfunded health care system that was further crippled by a reform launched by his predecessor that drastically cut state subsidies.

It has left Ukraine's hospitals without vital equipment. The infectious disease wing of the main regional hospital in Chernivtsi was built more than a century ago when the city was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it lacks a centralized oxygen supply system that is standard in any modern clinic.

The hospital's oxygen supply system is located in just one room, and nurses have to manually refill bags they call “oxygen pillows” every few minutes and carry them to patients elsewhere.

“A patient would beg, ‘Air, air, give me air!’ and there is...