Martin Stew asks whether a Siberian plague death could be the next Covid
The ITV News science correspondent's short drew more than ten times the comments a short here usually gets in a full day, and most of them were about the news itself.
ITV News
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 215,919 views a day, 14 times a normal first day on this channel (15,346).
Could Russia’s plague be the next Covid? #covid #plague #putin #russia
Ten hours after it went up, ITV News science correspondent Martin Stew's short on a suspected plague death in Russia had passed 129,000 views. A new short on the channel usually ends its whole first day at around 15,000.
The case, as the description sets it out, is this: a 28-year-old woman who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East died last week in a hospital in Shelekhov, a town just outside Irkutsk, according to local media. The suspected cause is pneumonic plague. The World Health Organization says it has contacted the Russian authorities and calls the risk outside the country "very low." Stew takes on the question in the title: could this become the next Covid?
The channel came at the story twice. A longer report, "How worried should we be about the death of a Russian plague lab worker?", also started many times faster than usual. It adds the UK Health Security Agency's view that the risk to the wider UK population remains very low, along with a WHO spokesman saying there is no sign of anything like the pandemic.
The comments came in quickly, and few of them were about Siberia. Many viewers accuse broadcasters of stoking fear and bring up the lockdown years. A smaller group keeps quoting a line about six outbreaks in six countries in six years.
It was a heavy day for the channel. The plague short drew the most views, and next came the report on two Sussex officers sacked over the Tasering and pepper-spraying of Donald Burgess, a 92-year-old amputee, in his care home. Further back, Mahatir Pasha's explainer mapping more than 25 years of change in the UK's regional economies drew a crowd of its own.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- ITV News
- Subscribers
- 2,250,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 8,595,189
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,398,576 (on a normal day: 1,240,749)
- Video published
- October 6, 2026
- Video views so far
- 129,341 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 215,919
The numbers
The short ran well ahead of the channel's usual first day, and so did several other reports posted alongside it.
