Sept 9, 2021:  A fire at a temporary hospital treating corona virus patients in Northern Macedonia has killed at least 10 people, officials say.

A fire broke out Wednesday evening in Tetovo in the northwest of the Balkan country, said Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who rushed to the city.

“A major tragedy has occurred at the Tetovo COVID 19 Center,” Zaev said on Twitter.

The fire was extinguished but many lives were lost. Health Minister Venko Filipche took to Twitter to offer condolences to the families of the victims, saying 10 deaths had been confirmed but that the number could rise. Local media showed footage of a fire at a hospital west of the town when firefighters arrived at the scene.

The fire was extinguished after a few hours. It was not immediately clear how many patients were in the hospital when the fire broke out at 9:00 pm local time (19:00 GMT), a senior government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The modular temporary COVID-19 unit was built at the hospital last year to care for corona virus patients in a city of about 50,000 people.

“The fire was very huge because the hospital is modular, there was plastic,” Saso Trajcevski, Tetovo’s deputy fire chief, told local television. “We put out the fire and evacuated the victims.”

Many of the injured from the fire were taken to hospitals in the capital, Skopje. Northern Macedonia has a population of about 2 million and its health facilities are stretched. Cases of the corona virus have been on the rise since mid-August, prompting the government to introduce strict social measures such as health passes for cafes and restaurants.

In the last 24 hours, 701 new corona virus infections and 24 deaths have been reported in the country.

Tetovo, a predominantly ethnic Albanian population, has one of the highest rates of corona virus in the country.

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