- A second death has been reported after a 'plague outbreak' in Russia's Irkutsk region, according to Russian media reports. Panic broke out last week when a female laboratory technician died and hundreds of people she came into contact with were placed in quarantine. Darya Shipilova, 28, was said to be working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia when she was exposed to pneumonic plague. She died on October 2. Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube holding live bacteria, according to the news outlet Lyudi Baikala. Other countries have tightened border health controls despite Russia's insistence that the plague researcher died from 'unidentified pneumonia', rather than the suspected 'Black Death' bacterium. Now, the Kremlin is scrambling to cover up the details as outlets are reporting a second person has died at Irkutsk's district hospital after reportedly contracting the plague. The Insider reports that on October 2, the federal television channel REN TV also deleted all five of its publications about the plague in the Irkutsk region. The administration of Baikalsk, a city in the Irkutsk region, published a Telegram post on October 3 urging residents not to travel to Shelekhov. 'Due to unofficial information about a confirmed case of plague in a person in the city of Shelekhov, we ask you to limit visits to Shelekhov and nearby settlements until the circumstances surrounding this threat are clarified,' the Baykalsk city administration said in a post. It deleted the post two hours later, Lyudi Baikala reported. Rospotrebnadzor has vehemently denied the existence of a plague outbreak in the region. On October 4, the agency stated that Shipilova died of 'pneumonia of an unspecified type' and assured that 'the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable.' However, according to exiled opposition website People of Baikal, doctors in the region are spe