Horrifying footage showing around 50 corpses stashed in an overflow morgue has been released from inside Russia.
This comes amid fears the true Covid-19 toll in the country is three times the scale admitted by official statistics.
The video from Novokuznetsk highlighting bodies piled on top of each other is the second example of such footage in a week from Siberia.
And in a separate incident in southern Russia, new details have emerged of an incident in which 13 vulnerable coronavirus patients died when their oxygen supply suddenly ran out.
A distraught worker filmed the horrific morgue scenes showing dozens of bodies - most but not all in black bags - stashed in a corridor and a room usually used for post mortem examinations.
He called the video “One minute in the life of a Covid morgue in Novokuznetsk city”.
He showed viewers some disinfecting equipment in the "clean zone" before saying: “Now let’s go to the 'dirty zone', look what is here.
“We have a corridor and it is full. Here is a dissecting room. Corpses everywhere, corpses, corpses everywhere.
“You can even stumble and fall. We literally walk over the heads of the dead.”
The local health ministry in Kemerovo region confirmed the authenticity of the video.
Reports said Oleg Evsa, head of the local department of the ministry had been fired by local governor Sergey Tsivilev, who is now himself suffering from coronavirus.
A statement said: "Given the increase in the number of cases over the past three weeks, there is a rise in the number of deaths.
“Due to a delay in the release of the bodies, about 50 bodies of the deceased were stored here.”
The ministry said many relatives were either ill with Covid-19 or on quarantine and so could not collect bodies of their loved ones for funerals.
Separate footage last week showed some 30 corpses in black bags stashed in a basement in a hospital in Barnaul, Altai region.
Another video highlighted by Borusio social media shows dozens of people suffering Covid-19 symptoms in Zheleznogorsk forced to queue in subzero temperatures to see a doctor.
Similar queues were seen in Krasnoyarsk.
There have been reports of severe shortages of antibiotics.
In Rostov-on-Don new details have emerged of a case last week when 13 patients died after the oxygen supply ran out at Hospital Number 20.
A doctor, Artur Toporov, has written to Vladimir Putin revealing how medics made frantic calls to restore the oxygen supply to critically-ill patients but to no avail.
“At 10.10pm…the oxygen dropped to zero level,” he wrote, explaining that this followed a series of interruptions in supply.
“Our reserves were empty.
“The state of all the patients worsened. We called the chief doctor again. For 40 minutes there was no oxygen in ventilators. The fifth clinical death was recorded at 10.30pm.”
Reports say a total of 13 died.
He claimed that hospital chiefs had started to remove evidence of the oxygen outage as detectives start investigating the shocking incident.
Russia national coronavirus information centre has registered some 26,050 deaths from Covid-19 but a second spike is severely hitting some regions.
Russia’s state statistics agency Rosstatput the real number of coronavirus deaths at 45,663 between April and August, the latest available month for which information is available.
However, a demographic forecaster Alexei Raksha who left Russia this summer claiming an official cover-up has said the true total should be “multiplied by three”, making it one of the worst in Europe.
Excess deaths now amount to around 115,000, it is claimed.
“I don’t think data related to public health or the death toll should be hidden away,” he told Bloomberg.
“It’s a throwback to some of the worst practices of the Soviet Union.”
