On 25 December 2020, at around 03:05 EET on Christmas night, it was reported that a fire had started in the [ro] at the [ro] quarter of Iași, Romania. Once the fire was announced, two fire engines with firefighters and an intensive care unit with a doctor came to the scene, managing to extinguish the fire at 04:00. A total of 18 patients[1][2] were evacuated from the hospital within 15 minutes,[3] including a 33-year-old man that was found semiconscious, with burns and signs of smoke inhalation. An attempt was made to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at 06:00.[1][2]
Bogdan Șaramet, director of the Socola Psychiatric Clinic Hospital, explained that this was the first time the victim had been hospitalized there and that the victim did not have a medical history, but that he had been brought in after "an acute episode". The pavilion in which he was located was the 1B, the largest in the hospital, which had been transformed at the beginning of 2020 into a "hall" for patients who underwent RT-PCRtests to see if they were infected by COVID-19 or not. The fire is believed to have started because a patient started smoking, although it is not known how did cigarettes get into the building.[3][4]
It was the second in a series of three major fires that occurred in hospitals in Romania. The first of them was the Piatra Neamț hospital fire on 14 November 2020 and the third was the Matei Balș hospital fire on 29 January 2021.[5][6] In early January, two more hospital fires occurred in the country, one on 2 January in Roman and another on 5 January in Galați. However, there were no deaths in either of them.[6]
47°7′42.33″N 27°36′49.892″E / 47.1284250°N 27.61385889°E / 47.1284250; 27.61385889Coordinates: 
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