Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, has been moved to a sick ward suffering from symptoms of a respiratory illness and has been tested for the coronavirus, the Izvestia newspaper reported on Monday. Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, last week declared a hunger strike. He has accused prison staff of denying him proper treatment for acute back and leg pain and earlier on Monday, he alleged there had been a tuberculosis outbreak on his ward. The 44-year-old politician said three people from his ward had been hospitalised with TB and joked darkly that catching the disease might offer him relief from his other ailments. “If I have tuberculosis, then maybe it’ll chase out the pain in my back and numbness in my legs. That’d be nice,” he wrote on Instagram. He said that prison authorities had measured his temperature at 38.1 degrees Celsius (100.6 degrees Fahrenheit). He also said he had a bad cough. Hours later, Izvestia, a pro-Kremlin newspaper, cited a statement by the federal prison service saying that Navalny had been moved to a sick ward and had undergone various tests, including for coronavirus. The Izvestia report did not say where the sick ward was, but one of his lawyers, according to the TV Rain outlet, said it appeared to be within the IK-2 corrective penal colony 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow, where he was being held. Navalny has accused prison authorities there of depriving him of sleep by waking him up hourly at night and refusing to give him proper medical care. Prison authorities deny sleep deprivation and have said previously that Navalny’s condition was satisfactory and that he has been provided with all necessary treatment. The prison holding him did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. His allies said late last week that they would stage a rolling protest outside his prison from Tuesday unless he was examined by a doctor of his choice and given what they regard as proper medicine. Navalny’s lawyers have visited him regularly in custody and have helped him continue to post messages on social media. Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, said she had appealed to Putin over Navalny’s “arbitrary arrest and deteriorating health condition”. “There is a real prospect that #Russia is subjecting him to a slow death. He must be granted immediate access to a medical doctor he trusts and he must be freed,” she wrote on Twitter. State media and some members of a prison monitoring group have accused Navalny of faking his medical problems to keep himself in the public eye, which Navalny and his allies deny.